Author(s)

G. TRISCONE1, N. ABDENNADHER1, C. BALISTRERI1, O. DONZÉ1, D. GRECO1, P. HAAS1, H. HAAS-PEKÖZ1, T. MOHAMED-NOUR, P. MUNIER, P. PONTELANDOLFO, R. PUTZU, J. RICHARD, H. STHIOUL, N. DELLEY, D. CHOFFAT, E. NIEDERHÄUSER, ROGER SCHAER, HENNING MÜLLER, J. DECAIX, S. RICHARD, C. MÜNCH-ALLIGNÉ, P. KUNZ & F. DESPOT

Abstract

In large cities, pollution composed of many different chemical components and small particles is an important public health problem that affects especially children and people presenting breathing difficulties.

One challenge for public authorities is to respect the norms given by the central state, but how? Today, concrete methods for reducing pollution are perceived by the majority of citizens as constraints. However, the authorities have the possibility of modifying the wind’s action by imposing architectural constraints, such as building emplacement and roof structure. This is the main objective of the Geneva ‘Clean City’ project financed by the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland.

‘Clean City’ focuses its research on one of Geneva’s polluted neighborhood called Pâquis, which is situated directly on the Geneva lake front. The project attempts to understand the dispersion of pollution from an experimental and a numerical point of view. After validation of the technique for a simple case, we compare environmental measurements on a 1/500 3D scale model of the Pâquis installed in an instrumented wind tunnel with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation obtained with the help of cloud computing.

Keywords

air pollution, CFD, polluants dispersion