Evaluation of the QUIC Pressure Solver: Comparision to wind-tunnel measurment on cubical buildings

Calculation of the wind pressure distribution on building surfaces is of great importance, for example, to the HVAC industry for determining the ideal location for vents on the building surfaces, in estimating the amount of infiltration into a building, and determining the wind load on a building. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling has been successfully used to solve these problems, but is computationally very intensive. In many emergency response scenarios, turnaround time is of the utmost importance, for example, during an accidental airborne release of industrial chemicals or a terrorist attack using biological or chemical agents. For these cases, the calculation of the infiltration of harmful airborne contaminants into buildings is essential for determining casualties and needs to be accomplished fast and fairly accurately. This presentation will describe the Quick Urban & Industrial Complex (QUIC) dispersion modeling system and the new QUIC Pressure Solver for determining the pressure distribution in terms of coefficients of pressure for building surfaces. Using the 3D mean wind fields created from the QUIC diagnostic wind model, the QUIC Pressure Solver generates a pressure field in 3D around buildings and on the buildings walls by solving the pressure Poisson equation. The pressure Poisson equation is obtained by taking the spatial divergence of the steady-state Reynolds-averaged Euler equations. With this approximation, results can be obtained in a few minutes for multi-building problems. The presentation will include comparisons of experimental data to the results from QUIC pressure solver for several single and multi-building configurations.