An efficient approach to transient turbulent dispersion modeling by CFD–statistical analysis of a many-puff system

Abstract

Transient turbulent dispersion phenomena can be found in various practical problems, such as the accidental release of toxic chemical vapor and the airborne transmission of infectious droplets. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an effective tool for analyzing such transient dispersion behaviors. However, the transient CFD analysis is often computationally expensive and time consuming. In the present study, a computationally efficient CFD–statistical hybrid modeling method has been developed for studying transient turbulent dispersion. In this method, the source emission is represented by emissions of many infinitesimal puffs. Statistical analysis is performed to obtain first the statistical properties of the puff trajectories and subsequently the most probable distribution of the puff trajectories that represent the macroscopic dispersion behaviors. In two case studies of ambient dispersion, the numerical modeling results obtained agree reasonably well with both experimental measurements and conventional k–ε modeling results published in the literature. More importantly, the proposed many-puff CFD-statistical hybrid modeling method effectively reduces the computational time by two orders of magnitude.