A COMPARISON OF WIND-TUNNEL EXPERIMENTS AND COMPUTATIONAL SIMULATIONSOF DISPERSION IN THE ENVIRONS OF BUILDINGS

A comparison is made between wind-tunnel experiments arid computer (CF D) simulations of the dispersion of buoyant and dense gas releases, cl ose to one or more buildings. The simulations were undertaken on a wor k-station platform, using a standard commercial CFD code, and were sub ject to realistic constraints on run-times and model sizes. Good agree ment is found for the simplest case, although it is noted that the sim ulations still contain significant numerical diffusion errors. Poorer agreement is found for the geometrically more complex cases. It is con cluded that accurate simulation of the dispersion of a buoyant or dens e gas cloud in the environs of one or more irregularly shaped building s is too ambitious on a work-station platform at the present time.