Digital twins present a virtual replica of an asset, which allows decisions about the life cycle of that asset to be tested in a virtual sandbox before being effected in reality. Using digital twins in the context of urban development facilitates the transformation of urban areas into the cities of the future. For urban environments, digital twins offer the opportunity to recreate many features and monitor important indicators, such as air quality.
The complexity and costs of full-scale pollution dispersion experiments, have made computational fluid dynamics popular in understanding air quality at the street level. To use any model as a scientific decision-support tool, its reliability must be quantified against representative experimental data. The model, can then be used as part of the digital twin to investigate air pollution and to evaluate the efficacy of measures to alleviate air quality problems.
This paper presents the ValUr project, which aims to carry out an experimental wind tunnel campaign to collect highquality validation data to be used for studying air pollution dispersion in an urban environment via computational modelling. The motivation, setup, plan and results of ValUr available to date are presented.