Many computational approaches exist to estimate heating and cooling energy demand of buildings at city scale, but few existing models can explicitly consider every buildings of an urban area, and even less can address hourly-or less-energy demand. However, both aspects are critical for urban energy supply designers. Therefore, this paper gives an overview of city energy simulation models from the point of view of short energy dynamics, and reviews the related modeling techniques, which generally involve detailed approaches. Analysis highlights computational costs of such simulations as key issue to overcome towards reliable microsimulation of the power demand of urban areas. Relevant physical and mathematical simplifications as well as efficient numerical and computational techniques based on uncertainties analysis and error quantification should thus be implemented.

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This study assesses the performance of a large eddy simulation (LES) based on the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) in predicting near field dispersion in street canyons with tree planting. Based on a benchmark test case benefiting from wind tunnel measurements (CODASC), this study qualitatively and quantitatively discusses the prediction of traffic-induced pollutant concentration with respect to several reference studies. It also analyses the physics of the flow and concentration fields. Although the problem might seem rather simple, the flow is highlighted to be strongly three dimensional and transient. These properties enhance pollutant dispersion in the empty street canyon but air flow velocity and turbulence intensity tend to decrease in tree crowns. This effect of trees increases both mean and peak concentration levels at pedestrian level, which may be problematic in cities with dense traffic. These results show that LBM-LES is particularly well suited to study dispersion problems towards the development of more breathable cities.

International audienceThe lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is an innovative approach in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Due to the underlying lattice structure, the LBM is inherently parallel and therefore well suited for high performance computing. Its application to outdoor aeraulic studies is promising, e.g. applied on complex urban configurations, as an alternative approach to the commonplace Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes and large eddy simulation methods based on the Navier-Stokes equations. Emerging many-core devices, such as graphic processing units (GPUs), nowadays make possible to run very large scale simulations on rather inexpensive hardware. In this paper, we present simulation results obtained using our multi-GPU LBM solver. For validation purpose, we study the flow around a wall-mounted cube and show agreement with previously published experimental results. Furthermore, we discuss larger scale flow simulations involving nine cubes which demonstrate the practicability of CFD simulations in building external aeraulics

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International audienceThis paper is the continuity of Guo's work [Phys.Rev., 2009, 046708] about a lattice Boltzmann model for axis-symmetric flows. This is a radius weighted LBM model: all the moments are proportional to the radial coordinate r. A Taylor series analysis is performed on the discrete Boltzmann Model in order to assess the consistency. The truncation error terms do not indicate any error increase along the radial direction, but they contain a spurious term u r /r which considerably reduces the model accuracy when radial velocity is non-null: simulation results highlight a reductions of the order of accuracy (from second to first). A new axis boundary condition was created to improve the model accuracy and to cope with the spurious error term. It was assessed though several test cases