Assessment of lattice Boltzmann method for low-rise building wind flow simulation with limited resources

Abstract

The study of low-rise buildings' interaction with wind is gravitating toward large eddy simulation (LES) for simulating airflow. As it is straightforward to implement and also offers the option to simulate particles, sound, and heat flow, the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) may be an interesting option among the LES methods but has so far barely been explored for this application. In this work, the LBM is investigated and assessed as a tool for the analysis of wind flow around low-rise buildings. The hardware resources used are limited to one GPU to mimic the limited resources an industrial setting or a preliminary study might allow for. We suggest an efficient LBM simulation setup and compare its results from the wind flow around nine exemplary gable roofed low-rise buildings to findings of previous studies, both in detail and in terms of found behaviors. All comparisons show good agreement between our findings and the previous results obtained via other simulation methods or wind tunnel measurements. These results confirm that the LBM may be used to investigate low-rise buildings, even with limited hardware. It is thus a further contender among the available LES methods and our setup may serve as starting point for its application.