Large eddy simulation of pollutant gas dispersion with buoyancy ejected from building into an urban street canyon

The dispersion of buoyancy driven smoke soot and carbon monoxide (CO) gas, which was ejected out from side building into an urban street canyon with aspect ratio of 1 was investigated by large eddy simulation (LES) under a perpendicular wind flow. Strong buoyancy effect, which has not been revealed before, on such pollution dispersion in the street canyon was studied. The buoyancy release rate was 5 MW. The wind speed concerned ranged from 1 to 7.5 m/s. The characteristics of flow pattern, distribution of smoke soot and temperature, CO concentration were revealed by the LES simulation. Dimensionless Froude number (Fr) was firstly introduced here to characterize the pollutant dispersion with buoyancy effect counteracting the wind. It was found that the flow pattern can be well categorized into three regimes. A regular characteristic large vortex was shown for the CO concentration contour when the wind velocity was higher than the critical re-entrainment value. A new formula was theoretically developed to show quantitatively that the critical re-entrainment wind velocities, u(c), for buoyancy source at different floors, were proportional to -1/3 power of the characteristic height. LES simulation results agreed well with theoretical analysis. The critical Froude number was found to be constant of 0.7. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.