Numerical simulation of snowdrift development in non-equilibrium flow fields around buildings

A numerical simulation was carried out to study the transient snow drifting phenomena around buildings. The method employs the commercial CFD software Ansys Fluent with additional user-defined functions to model snow transport. Drifting snow analysis around buildings has been extensively studied, but there have been few validation examples in non-equilibrium flow fields around buildings using the saltation fetch distance to account for the snow transport rate. Therefore, in this study, we conducted snowdrift analysis in three types of non-equilibrium flow fields and compared the results with actual measurements. For cube-shaped buildings and two-level flat roofs, the simulation results captured the trends observed in the actual measurements. However, in the case of snow fence analysis, an underestimation of the accumulation amount was observed downstream of the snowdrifts.