Evaluation of the QUIC Pressure Solver using wind-tunnel data from single and multi-building experiments

As part of the Quick Urban & Industrial Complex (QUIC) Dispersion Modeling System, a pressure solver has been developed to compute a 3D pressure field around buildings and on building walls in terms of coefficient of pressure (Gowardhan et. al., 2005). The solver generates the pressure field by solving the pressure Poisson equation, obtained by taking the spatial divergence of the steady-state Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible flows. The input to the solver is the 3D mean wind field obtained from the QUIC-URB fast response urban wind model (Pardyjak and Brown, 2002). The present study will describe evaluation of the solver using wind-tunnel data from several single building configurations and a multi-building array with a shear- inflow profile normal to the building front face. Comparisons were made with a tall building experiment (length: width: height = 1:1:8) of Baines and Douglas (1963), a low building experiment (1:1:0.5) reported on by the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ, 1998), and to a seven-row array of wide buildings by Brown et al. (2001). In the presentation, we will describe the pressure solver and show the comparisons to the experimental data.