Improving Air Quality of Public Transport Interchanges Design Strategies to integrate CFD simulation in early design process

Indoor public transport interchanges (PTI) are ubiquitous in Hong Kong. In the hyper-dense urban context, land use has been optimized through the design of complex public facilities. Owing to the use of diesel engines by public transport vehicles, the main pollutants are sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxides. Although the Hong Kong Government took measurements to improve the air quality in PTI, unfortunately, the problem has not been solved up to now. To effectively integrate the architectural design with efficient ventilation system to remove pollutants, designers and engineers need to predict and visualize the pollutant concentration and the time history of pollutant transfer during early stage of design. With time dependent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and the scientific visualization technology, architects and engineers could visualize the pollutant distribution in real time, and “what-if” scenarios could be investigated collaboratively. In this project, we have established a time-dependent CFD multiphase model to describe the pollutant concentration and the time history of pollutant transfer in PTI. On the basis of simulation results, several new design schemes are proposed and tested.