Terrain-Driven Wind Environment Generation for UAM

Recently, urban air mobility (UAM) has been attracting a lot of attention as a possible solution to solve traffic congestion in metropolitan city areas. However, there are still several problems of UAM operation to be solved. One of the most important issues is safe flight under bad weather conditions. Especially, safe operation of the UAM under strong winds and turbulence is a critical problem. To address this issue, the flight characteristics of the UAM should be evaluated under an actual urban wind environment. In this study, a method of generating realistic urban wind environments is suggested. The weather research and forecasting (WRF)–large eddy simulation (LES) coupled model with the iterative nesting algorithm was adopted to generate a wind environment with sufficient resolution for UAM. To validate the WRF accuracy, the result was compared with observation data. The LES results were also analyzed in terms of the characteristics of the wind pattern around the building.