A Physics-Based CFD and Visualization Framework for Evaluating Urban Heat Island Mitigation Under Climate Change Adaptation Scenarios: A Case Study of Gwacheon City, Republic of Korea

Urban heat islands (UHIs) pose escalating threats to public health and thermal comfort in dense urban environments. However, physics-based evaluations of material-specific cooling interventions and their integration into operational digital twin platforms remain limited. This study develops an integrated framework connecting computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling with digital twin visualization to evaluate UHI mitigation strategies. The objectives are to quantify the thermal mitigation effects of surface emissivity optimization on land surface temperature (LST) and pedestrian-level air temperature (Tair) to establish a data preprocessing pipeline converting CFD outputs into platform-independent visualization datasets, and to comparatively evaluate 2D GIS-based and 3D voxelization visualization approaches. Four emissivity scenarios were simulated using STAR-CCM+ for a 4 km2 residential area in Gwacheon City, Republic of Korea. Comprehensive optimization (Case D) reduced the mean LST from 46.6 °C to 42.0 °C and Tair from 35.7 °C to 35.3 °C. Concrete-only optimization achieved 90.5% of the total thermal reduction while decreasing spatial variability (σ) from 7.1 to 5.8 during peak hours. The voxel-based 3D visualization provided a superior representation of vertical thermal stratification compared to 2D mapping. These findings establish a scalable foundation for climate-responsive urban management.