CFD modeling of 3D indoor gas contaminant plumes for testing search algorithms of mobile robot

Abstract

Accidental chemical gas release in indoor environments such as industrial sites and office buildings could become hazardous. This has highlighted the need to localize the source of contaminant in least time possible using plume-tracing mobile robots. Due to the inconsistency of contaminant fluid flows in experiments, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques are used to predict indoor flows and contaminant plumes for testing three dimensional (3D) plume search algorithms. In this study, 3D airflows and plumes of contaminant gas, H2S, in a building were predicted by CFD techniques. The predicted velocity fields and concentration fields were used to test the capability of a previously developed two dimensional (2D) search algorithm and then a newly developed 3D search algorithm. The flows and plumes are found to be strongly three dimensional, which is typical for indoor airflows. The 2D search algorithm failed to localize the source while the 3D search algorithm was capable of locating the source in the complex environment setup. This paper presents CFD’s capability to create a realistic environment for testing the developed search algorithm for plume tracing robots at low cost.