Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/T19667/01
Title:	Novel methods for simulating the dispersion of reactive pollutants in the atmosphere
Principal Investigator:	Mastorakos, Professor E
Other Investigators:	Britter, Professor R
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Engineering
Organisation:	University of Cambridge
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 January 2005	Ends:	30 September 2008	Value (£):	139,216
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Pollution Urban & Land Management
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Environment
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
A current goal of urban air pollution dispersion studies is to predict as accurately as possible the pollution that humans actually experience. Grid models for cities must hence have enough resolution to track the pollution produced in street canyons or dispersed in the immediate vicinity of industrial sources. This necessitates novel approaches concerning the chemical reaction and its interaction with the atmospheric turbulence because the reactants segregation cannot be neglected at such fine scales.The aim of the work proposed here is to provide enabling techniques for these problems by developing closures capable of incorporating pollutant fluctuations and realistic chemistry in operational Air Quality Models. The work will comprise three parts. In the first, reduced chemical mechanisms will be constructed, which will facilitate calculations at fine resolution by decreasing the number of species to be solved and by selecting mathematically the part of the chemistry that is most suitable for the particular scale, emission, time of day, and background pollutant concentrations. The second part will comprise the development of the Conditional Moment Closure, an existing method for turbulent combustion, for applications in urban air pollution. This will allow the incorporation of micro-mixing in Air Quality calculations, a long-sought goal of the atmospheric dispersion community. Finally, both these novel methods will be explored to provide sub-grid models for larger and practical Air Quality Models appropriate for making regulatory decisions.The work is a collaboration between an expert in chemical mechanism reduction and in turbulent reacting flows who has worked mainly until now in the field of combustion, and an expert in urban air dispersion who has made important contributions to how mixing occurs above cities. Due to this unique synergy, the team is well placed to contribute to the combined problem of turbulent dispersion and chemical evolution of pollutants in urban-scale environmental problems.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.cam.ac.uk