Computational and physical modeling of pollution dispersion in a rural area*

Use of open fires for cooking in rural Mexico is known to cause poor indoor air quality.  However, contributions to local ambient pollution caused by these emissions are poorly quantified due to the lack of pollution monitoring stations in rural areas. Air quality models Quick Urban & Industrial Complex (QUIC) and AERMOD were deployed to simulate the dispersion of stove emissions in a Mexican village. A Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) was used for visualization and quantification of dispersed PM_2.5 concentration around modeled buildings in a water tank. The physical experiment is conducted for validation of the QUIC simulation results, and the comparison demonstrates good qualitative agreements. Based on experiments and simulations, we intend to scale the essential features of flows from simplified morphology to complex flows in real village configurations. Pollutants trapped in the building wakes tend to infiltrate back into houses and consequently impair indoor air quality. Factors that determine pollution distribution in the wake of buildings such as the meteorological condition, emission rate, and configuration of buildings are evaluated in the study as well. We discuss the experimental setup, laboratory results, and comparable modeling results in the presentation.