Three-dimensional primitive prediction with building embedded Swin Transformer for urban turbulence
Large-eddy simulation (LES) is the benchmark for resolving canonical urban canopy physics critical for pedestrian comfort, pollutant dispersion modeling, and Urban Air Mobility operations. However, generating long-horizon LES data requires prohibitively long simulation times, making it impractical for real-time or large-scale applications. To overcome these limitations, we develop 3DSwinUrbanNet, a three-dimensional (3D) Swin-Transformer-based model that directly predicts the full primitive variables (u,v,w,p) using time steps orders of magnitude larger than those in the computational fluid dynamics solver (Δt=1 min vs LES Δt=0.05 s). 3D building geometry embeddings are integrated into the encoder, backbone, and decoder via average-pooling over patches and linear projection into the latent space. Model accuracy is evaluated using time-averaged fields, wall-normal profiles, turbulence statistics, and scale-resolved diagnostics (probability density functions and energy spectra). This approach yields a 1984× speedup (2.58 s vs LES 5120 s for 20 min forecasting) without precursor overhead, enabling real-time predictions on a single Ray Tracing Texel eXtreme 4090 graphic processing unit.
Authors
- Panagiotis Tsiotras (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7563-4129)
- Sang Lee
- Haechan Kim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0286-7313)
Institutions
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physics of Fluids
- Published
- 2026-04-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0324405
- Primary Topic
- Wind and Air Flow Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement