A SWEEP-PLANE ALGORITHM FOR THE SIMPLIFICATION OF 3D BUILDING MODELS IN THE APPLICATION SCENARIO OF WIND SIMULATIONS

Abstract. As the number of virtual 3D city models is steadily increasing, so are the possible applications that take advantage of them. 3D models can be used for applications that range from simple graphic visualizations to complex simulations, such as air flow and acoustic simulations. The geometric requirements needed for Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) increase the already very high complexity of processing 3D models. If there are too many small geometric details, mesh generation may fail. In addition it will create small grid cells that consequently lead to a high computation time. So far, the necessary simplifications have been performed in a time consuming manual process. To reduce the preprocessing time for the considered simulation topic, the simplifications and modifications have to be automated. In this paper we introduce a sweep-plane algorithm designed to automatically simplify virtual 3D models (e.g. CityGML) by removing geometry information unnecessary for numerical simulations. The algorithm will search for edges whose length does not reach a predefined threshold and dissolve them by sweeping nearby faces. As a result we obtain a simplified geometry that can be meshed properly. This algorithm serves as a general basis for the creation of future simplification algorithms that may even be applicable to any simulation necessary. For this paper, one of Stuttgart’s city blocks was processed with the developed algorithm and then used in a wind simulation carried out with ANSYS Fluent.