CFD For Disasters

Natural disasters have been present since the beginning of time. In the beginning of June, more than 7,000 people were evacuated in the region of Bohemia, because of the flooding of Vltava and Elbe rivers [1]. According to estimates, the overall damage caused by this flood could reach over 20 billion Czech crowns (800m €) [2].  Although we can’t prevent these disasters from happening, with modern technology we can try to minimize the consequences.

IT4Innovations in Ostrava has been developing a platform called FLOREON+ to simulate floods using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and recently it has been expanded to cover simulation of air pollution and other environmental hazards as well. During the first two weeks,  my buddy Nathan and I have been developing a postprocessing method to visualize gas leakage simulation data using Paraviews’s Python scripting. The main goal is to create an automated workflow that produces easily interpretable 2D pollution maps for the decision makers. The script has to be modifiable, in order to visualize different altitudes and pollution concentrations. I don’t want to present incomplete products, so for now you will have to settle for a 3D visualization of an imaginary gas leakage in our campus area during heavy wind, which is found below. The point source is at the darkest area in the rightmost corner of the gas.

Gas spreading through VSB-TU Ostrava campus area

In the next few weeks we will continue developing the script even further and try to apply it on different models. As a person with CFD background I am also very interested in the actual simulation process and hopefully I can participate in that as well. I will keep you posted and more information about the FLOREON+ project can be found on the website www.floreonplus.eu/. Ostrava over and out.

P.S.

Hi mum!

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.radio.cz/en/section/news/news-2013-06-03

[2] http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/news-brief/3868261-first-damage-estimates-20000000000