Research on terrain grids generation in computational fluid dynamics software

Abstract

Traditional research of environmental impact of natural draft cooling tower in nuclear power plant is based on diffusion model or tunnel experiment, and with the development of modern mainframe computers and turbulence models, it is possible to use CFD method to simulate plume drift. The CFD software, due to its powerful computing ability, can simulate and display the plume drift more accurately. This paper presents an effective way of generating terrain grids which can be used in StarCD, a CFD software. The SRTM terrain data is obtained from internet and IDW interpolation method is used in the co-ordinates translation process. A powerful program named GridInter is developed using Fortran90 to convert terrain data to StarCD vertex file, terrain grids generation process in StarCD including nuclear power plant building grids combination is also introduced, this model can be directly used in the numerical simulation of plume dispersion.