The Role of Computational Fluid Dynamics within City Digital Twins: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

The rapid urbanization trend has led to complex challenges in managing urban environments, ranging from energy consumption to environmental quality and public health. In response, the concept of city digital twins has emerged, offering a promising approach to understanding and managing urban complexity. City digital twins utilize real-time data and simulations to create virtual replicas of urban environments, enabling stakeholders to analyze, optimize, and make informed decisions about various aspects of city life. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) plays a crucial role within city digital twins, offering capabilities to simulate wind flow dynamics, air quality, and pollutant dispersion within urban environments. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of integrating CFD within city digital twins. Opportunities include optimizing urban planning and design processes, enhancing environmental quality, and improving public health outcomes. However, challenges such as data integration and quality, implementation constraints, computational complexity, and communication of results must be addressed to realize the full application potential of CFD in urban environments. Despite these challenges, the integration of CFD within city digital twins holds promise for creating more livable, sustainable, and resilient cities in the face of urbanization and climate change.