A new sensor configuration design method for source term estimation in urban neighborhood with complex conditions under different wind directions

When hazardous substances leak into the atmosphere, Source Term Estimation (STE) can quickly determine the information of the leaked substance to control the threat of the leakage event to the environment and public safety. Reasonable sensor configuration is the foundation of STE. Existing sensor configuration schemes have limited applicability in STE processes. When urban neighborhood has complex building structures and airflow conditions, there is a lack of a method that can provide reasonable sensor configurations to ensure good STE performance. In this study, a new sensor configuration design method is proposed, which weights the joint entropy of adjoint concentration information of multi wind directions to obtain the cost function, and then uses Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm to minimize the cost function. This article selects a real complex urban neighborhood for simplified modeling, and designs the optimal sensor array for it. STE results of several leakage scenarios are compared with the optimal and uniform sensor configurations at different leakage locations and wind directions. Compared to traditional uniform sensor configurations, the optimal sensor configuration has significantly improved estimation performance in both source location and strength, with a reduction of 27 %–51 % in the bias of source location identification and 17 %–39 % in the bias of source strength estimation.