On the minimal wind directions required to assess mean annual air pollution concentration based on CFD results

Abstract Computational fluid dynamics has shown a great interest among the scientific community to assess air pollutant concentrations in urban areas and, define strategies to limit air pollution and achieve sustainable cities of the future. Recent studies have given methodologies on how to assess mean annual concentrations based on numerical model results to compare with the annual air quality standards. Nonetheless, these methodologies need many wind directions to be modelled and, therefore, lead to high calculation costs. The purpose of this paper is to present two approaches to decrease the calculation costs when calculating annual concentration from computational fluid dynamics results by (1) ignoring uniformly spaced wind direction and (2) considering the predominant wind directions. According to the results, the first approach is on overall better than the second one for any wind rose or building layout considered. With the first approach, the calculation costs can be reduced up to 50% without leading to more than 20% of error, and even less error can be expected for homogeneous wind roses. Finally, a method to finely evaluate errors made when using the first approach versus using the whole wind rose, without computing it, is presented.