Integrating Airborne LiDAR Data into Urban Flow Models: A Focus on Buildings and Trees

Airborne LiDARs can provide updated and highly accurate information of the 3D urban layer. This presentation focuses on transforming such information into boundary conditions for urban flow models.

When addressing buildings, we use a method called City3D [1], which outputs a watertight geometrical model at a specified level of detail (LoD).This resulting model is then utilized in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver EllipSys [2]. We demonstrate how a novel implementation of the immersed boundary method (IBM) [3] simulates the wind flow and dispersion around the building. Additionally, we explore how different LoD
influence the simulation results.

The LiDAR data can also be used to model the drag force of trees. We demonstrate this process based on recent observations of a real tree. Finally, we discuss the relative importance of trees and buildings in an urban modelling context, highlighting the significance of including more details in the 3D urban layer.

References
[1] Jin Huang, Jantien Stoter, Ravi Peters, and Liangliang Nan. City3d: Large-scale building reconstruction from airborne lidar point clouds. Remote Sensing, 14(9), 2022.
[2] Jess A. Michelsen. Basis3D - a Platform for Development of Multiblock PDE Solvers: - release, volume AFM 92-05. Technical University of Denmark, 1992.
[3] Niels Troldborg, Niels N. Sørensen, and Frederik Zahle. Immersed boundary method for the incompressible reynolds averaged navier–stokes equations. Computers Fluids, 237:105340, 2022.