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This presentation focuses on the specific requirements, strategies and key choices for mesh generation in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of air flows around buildings. CFD has established as a valuable tool in building engineering for predicting the value of relevant flow properties such as velocity, pressure, turbulence intensity, temperature. Architectural Aerodynamics deals with large and complex geometries consisting of buildings, roads, green areas, a number of other smaller objects such as cars, trees, pedestrians and others. Each of those objects has on its surface a number of details with dimensions even several orders of magnitude smaller than the object they belong to. This large range of dimensions is a major challenge to the creation of a high-quality computational mesh.The computational cost and the quality of results of simulations are largely influenced by how the computational domain is created, by the choice of which objects and what details are included and which are discarded and by the meshing strategy and algorithm. Special care must be paid to the regions close to the solid surfaces, so that an appropriate cell dimension is achieved, in accordance with the turbulence model that will be applied.Guidelines from relevant literature and lessons learned from professional and academic practice will be presented to serve as an introduction to this fascinating and challenging field of numerical simulation.

Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD, building aerodynamics, mesh generation, turbulence, architectural aerodynamics, urban design, building engineering