Its expertise contributes to an efficient and sustainable use of energy and raw materials through the development and implementation of processes, equipment, systems and methods. The Institute also focuses on the analysis of chemical emissions and the fate and effect of pollu-tants on the environment. Industrial safety and ecological risks studies supplement the core business of the Institute.
The main research activities of TNO Institute of Environmental Sciences, Energy Research and Process Innovation aim at developing sustainable production processes and efficient treatment and sanitation methods, developing and implementing sustainable production chains and minimisation of energy consumption, establishing sustainable use of materials by prevention, re-use and processing waste products, and determining the effects on the environmental quality and safety due to industrial activities and products, and transport.
Work for the international market accounts for 25 per cent of the Institute's activ-ities. The Institute is active in a wide range of regions including Europe (Euro-pean Union, Central and Eastern Europe), USA, Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East (Oman, Dubai), and Asia (Japan, India). Programmes and projects are commis-sioned by industries, governments and interna-tional fund-ing organis-ations .
The Institute operates under quality control accreditation conforming to ISO 9001, STERLAB/(NKO).
Participating in TRAPOS is the Department of Environmental Quality. The department Environmental Quality developed a family of so-called CAR-models from which two are within the scope of the TRAPOS project. The CAR-models in their current state will always be starting point for ongoing and new research activities. TNO will provide access to the following models for the dispersion of air pollution by traffic developed by TNO: TNO-traffic model, and CAR-international. The TNO models will be compared with models developed by the other participating institutes of the network and tested on experimental data. The experimental data the models were based upon, will be available for research activities of the visiting young scientist in the framework of this project. Improvement of the CAR-International model and the TNO-Traffic model takes place continuously during the application of these models in studies carried out for mainly authorities, and lead to ad-hoc solutions. At the moment we are performing additional research projects in order to improve and to extend our models according to a systematic approach. TNO will contribute with their experience in modelling dispersion of road pollution and provide the necessary guidance for visiting scientists in verification, validation and improving the current models. The research activities of the visiting scientists will be carried out in ongoing research at the time of his stay.
The TNO Traffic Model (sometimes called CAR Special) is a detailed model for calculating air pollution concentrations including percentiles along roads in built-up and rural areas. The model describes the dispersion of the emissions by traffic, influenced by buildings, trees, traffic noise screens and barriers, elevated and sunken roads, etc. The model is based on general dispersion theory and aerodynamics, a large number of wind tunnel simulations of roads in combination with a variety of obstacles, and on field measurements of roadside air pollution. The required improvements of the TNO-Traffic model are focused on a better description of the effect of traffic noise screens and barriers, buildings near the road, and deepening and elevation of roads, on the concentrations of pollutants near roads. Data will be collected by a search in the open literature, by exchanging data between the participants of this project, carrying out field experiments and wind tunnel experiments, and numerical experiments by CFD-models. More advanced numerical models (CFD) may provide additional information on how to improve parameterisation of the applied models.
CAR-International is an easy to use model that calculates air pollution concentrations from traffic and street characteristics. The dispersion parameters were derived from the TNO-Traffic Model. It has been developed for estimating local concentration and percentiles in cities and is valid for 5 to 30 meter from the road axis, for various road types, including the street canyon. The required improvements of the CAR-International model are focused on a better description of the traffic induced turbulence, on a better method to estimate the regional background concentrations, and to extend the distance to the road for which the predictions are valid, and to incorporate more aspects related to other foreign countries (emission factors, climate, etc.).
Although the existing traffic pollution models are available in operational form, there is a need to adapt the models for describing the dispersion of pollutants in cities as a whole. This requires the scale of application to be extended from about 30 meters to several kilometres, and to tune the models to existing traffic and building related databases. A large project is momentarily running to cope among other with this problem in the next 2 years.
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