Cellular Automata-based Anthropogenic Heat Simulation

Cellular automata (CA) models have been for several years, employed to describe urban phenomena like growth of human settlements, changes in land use and, more recently, dispersion of air pollutants. We propose to adapt CA to study the dispersion of anthropogenic heat emissions on the micro scale. Three dimensional cubic CA with a constant cell size of 0.15 m have been implemented. Simulations suggest an improvement in processing speed compared to conventional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, which are limited in scale and yet incapable of solving simulations on local or larger scale. Instead of solving the NavierStokes equations, as in CFD, only temperature and heat differences for the CA are modeled. Radiation, convection and turbulence have been parameterized according to scale. This CAbased approach can be combined with an agent-based traffic simulation to analyse the effect of driving behavior and other microscopic factors on urban heat.