From large-eddy simulations to deep learning: A U-net model for fast urban canopy flow predictions
This work addresses the need for fast and accurate wind flow assessments for urban design and pedestrian safety, representing an incremental improvement by applying an existing deep learning architecture to a specific domain.
This study tackled the problem of slow and costly wind flow predictions in urban canopies by developing a U-Net deep learning model, which reduced computation time from about 10 hours to 1 second while achieving mean relative errors of 9.3% for velocity magnitude and 5.2% for turbulence intensity.
Accurate prediction of wind flow fields in urban canopies is crucial for ensuring pedestrian comfort, safety, and sustainable urban design. Traditional methods using wind tunnels and Computational Fluid Dynamics, such as Large-Eddy Simulations (LES), are limited by high costs, computational demands, and time requirements. This study presents a deep neural network (DNN) approach for fast and accurate predictions of urban wind flow fields, reducing computation time from an order of 10 hours on 32 CPUs for one LES evaluation to an order of 1 second on a single GPU using the DNN model. We employ a U-Net architecture trained on LES data including 252 synthetic urban configurations at seven wind directions ($0^{o}$ to $90^{o}$ in $15^{o}$ increments). The model predicts two key quantities of interest: mean velocity magnitude and streamwise turbulence intensity, at multiple heights within the urban canopy. The U-net uses 2D building representations augmented with signed distance functions and their gradients as inputs, forming a $256\times256\times9$ tensor. In addition, a Spatial Attention Module is used for feature transfer through skip connections. The loss function combines the root-mean-square error of predictions, their gradient magnitudes, and L2 regularization. Model evaluation on 50 test cases demonstrates high accuracy with an overall mean relative error of 9.3% for velocity magnitude and 5.2% for turbulence intensity. This research shows the potential of deep learning approaches to provide fast, accurate urban wind assessments essential for creating comfortable and safe urban environments. Code is available at https://github.com/tvarg/Urban-FlowUnet.git