Numerical simulation of flow over buildings using OpenFOAM®

Abstract

The present work is a numerical simulation of flow over buildings. The numerical simulation was carried out using an open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool called OpenFOAM®. The Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes Equations (RANS) was solved along with a two-equation turbulent closure. The solutions from the numerical simulations are post-processed with open source software namely Paraview which is based on Visualisation Tool Kit (VTK). Effect of flow over buildings is described in terms of contours of velocity. Further, the same data is processed with Line Integral Convolution (LIC) to reveal three-dimensional flow properties on a plane parallel to the inlet flow. The streamlines are visualised in addition to the LIC and velocity contours. The post processed results reveal the real flow physics with just LIC alone or with the help of streamlines and contours.