The Rapid Evaluation of Mean Concentration Fields in Lagrangian Stochastic Modelling Using a Density Kernel Estimator

Abstract

Lagrangian Stochastic (LS) particle models have proven to be a useful computational tool for the description and prediction of dispersion of pollutant releases in complex meteorological situations (e.g., space- and time-varying situations pertaining to complex flow and turbulence). However, simulating the emitted pollutant by following the trajectories of many "marked" fluid elements released from the source distribution brings up the difficulty of the correct estimation of the mean concentration of the dispersing pollutant from the particle trajectory information. Recently, the density kernel estimation method has been proposed and applied successfully to estimate mean concentrations from Lagrangian Stochastic particle models. However, the computational effort needed by this method increases as N(exp 2) (assuming the number of receptor locations N(sub r) at which the concentration is required is comparable to the number of fluid particles N(sub p) used in the trajectory simulation, so N(sub r) = N(sub p) -N) and, in consequence, the method has not been widely used because of the significant computer resources required. Here, we describe a novel algorithm for calculating the kernel estimate of the mean concentration field whose computational complexity scales only as N. The technique uses a tesselation (subdivision) of space in cubic cells of side length h (where h is the bandwidth of the kernel function), and then associates a linked-list data structure with each cell that is used as a bookkeeping device to keep track of the "marked" fluid particles in that cell. The fast approach developed here has been verified by comparing results with the direct implementation of the kernel estimator and with the conventional box-counting estimator for the mean concentration field.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA428937

Entities

People

  • E. Yee
  • Yu‐Tsun Shao

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Boundary Layer
  • Classification
  • Computational Complexity
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Counting Methods
  • Differential Equations
  • Estimators
  • Kernel Functions
  • Lists (Data Structures)
  • Particle Trajectories
  • Simulations
  • Three Dimensional
  • Turbulence
  • Turbulent Flow
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Aerosol Science/Aerosol Physics
  • Approximation Theory.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation

Technology Areas

  • Space