Atmospheric Science Seminar: Dr. Bo Yang - Physics-based, data-driven modeling of micro-environmental air quality impact from stationary and mobile sources

Description

Dr Bo Yang, a Postdoctoral Associate working with Professor Max Zhang from the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering will present “Physics-based, data-driven modeling of micro-environmental air quality impact from stationary and mobile sources”.

Abstract: 

Public health studies have indicated strong correlations between air pollution and adverse respiratory and cardiovascular effects, premature death, and mortality. Widely used in regulatory applications for permitting new sources and in health studies to estimate exposure, Gaussian-based atmospheric dispersion models play a crucial role in air quality management but have several well-documented limitations. The main challenge of improving dispersion models is how to represent the complex turbulent flow field from the source(s) to the receptor(s) at a local length scale (~ 1 km) with high resolutions (~ 1 m).  At the local scale, built environment and/or moving vehicle induced turbulence have significant effects on the dispersion process.  This talk presents the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling of the turbulence, dispersion, and transformation of the air pollutants from two major air pollution sources, the power generation facilities and the highway vehicles.  These two major sources could be close to communities and correspondingly raise local air quality concerns.  For example, the hydrocarbon fueled distributed generation (DG) facilities are usually located near end-users and have shorter stacks than those of centralized power plants.  Communities near major highways are exposed to elevated air pollutant concentrations than those far away from highways.

Open to all.