Developments in CFD for industrial and environmental applications in wind engineering

An overview is provided of the capabilities and limitations of CFD as a tool for wind engineering, with particular reference to commercial CFD codes. The status of the modelling of turbulence, heat and mass transfer is briefly reviewed and developments in computer solution methodology are outlined, with emphasis on geometry-handling and mesh-generation capabilities and parallel computing. Examples are shown of recent applications in the built environment and other industries which illustrate the current state of art. The overall conclusion is that, although there are well-known weaknesses in the physics modelling, the level of prediction accuracy is already sufficient for some purposes. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.