Abstract
In this paper, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is developed
to simulate the methane (CH4) dispersion of exhaust gases from the
Munich Oktoberfest, the world’s largest folk festival. Since we assume
CH4 losses during the natural gas driven heating and cooking process,
our aim is to provide a methodology for estimating these emissions. We
developed a forward CFD dispersion model and combined it with
on-the-site backpack measurements to quantify the emissions at the
festival. The emission number is determined by scaling the simulated to
the measured concentrations. Our sensitivity study reveals that the
turbulent Schmidt number and the measured wind speed have high impacts
on the emission results. Further, we investigated the effect of
buoyancy, since there is a temperature gradient between the exhaust
gases and the environment. Our results show that the buoyancy is an
important factor for assessing hot emissions. Finally, we compared our
findings to results determined by a Gaussian plume model and discussed
advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Our findings show that
CFD models can reproduce real dispersion processes in very complex
environments with a high spatial resolution and are able to predict
emissions. This study offers a completely new methodology to quantify
local emissions on a real scale array and presents one of the first
attempts to use CFD to study superimposed greenhouse gas sources.