Study of Transport and Dispersion of Pollutants
using Computational Fluid Dynamics

GRAND Seminar September 17, 12PM, Wed., 2012, ENGR 4201

Fernando Camelli
Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics
GMU

Abstract:

The need for efficient tools to study the transport and dispersion of chemical, biological, or nuclear (C/B/N) agents has been the center of attention for more than a decade. The increasing computational power combined with the improvement of algorithms has made CFD models attractive tools to study atmospheric releases at urban scales. However, these tools have not reached the desired rapidness yet. If the time frame provided by the National Research Council (NRC) is considered (immediate first response, 0 to 2 hours; early response, 2 to 12 hours; and sustained response support, greater than 12 hours), CFD tools can be expected to perform in the two upper brackets of this classification: early and sustained response. There have been attempts to make CFD usable in the immediate response time, but these approaches usually rely on the pre-calculations of the situations with interpolated and/or the simplified geometrical details of the modeled area. One common simplification is to consider the terrain as a flat surface ignoring all elevation differences on the landscape.

Short Bio:

Fernando E. Camelli is Assistant Professor in the School of Physics, Astronomy and Computational Sciences at George Mason University. He received his Ph. D. diploma in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason University in 2002. His undergraduate studies were in the University of Buenos Aires Argentina. His research focuses in transport and dispersion of pollutants in urban settings, and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). He developed algorithms to integrate data in GIS format into CFD models. He has researched the flow around the superstructure of ships for the Navy to help in the design of the HVAC systems of ships, and he studied the flow patterns in the landing decks of ships. He develops algorithms to preprocess the geometry extraction of buildings and complex terrain with almost no user interaction. He is part of the research team on the Center for Blast Mitigation at George Mason University.