Dalibor Cavar

Laser scanning of a recirculation zone on the Bolund escarpment

Rapid variations in the height of the recirculation zone are measured with a scanning wind lidar over a small escarpment on the Bolund Peninsula. The lidar is essentially a continuous-wave laser Doppler anemometer with the capability of rapidly changing the focus distance and the beam direction. The instrument measures the line-of-sight velocity 390 times per second and scans ten wind profiles from the ground up to seven meters per second. We observe a sharp interface between slow and fast moving fluid after the escarpment, and the interface is moving rapidly up and down. This implies that the position of the maximum velocity standard deviation is elevated a few meters above the surface. Close to the ground the mean wind is reversed relative to the general flow. The results are used to test computational fluid dynamics models for flow over terrain, and has relevance for wind energy. The preliminary comparison shows that the models are incapable of reproducing the reversed flow close to the surface, but more works needs to be done.

Comparison of OpenFOAM and EllipSys3D for neutral atmospheric flow over complex terrain

The flow solvers OpenFOAM and EllipSys3D are compared in the case of neutral atmospheric flow over terrain using the test cases of Askervein and Bolund hills. Both solvers are run using the steady-state Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes k– turbulence model. One of the main modeling differences between the two solvers is the wall-function approach. The OpenFOAM v.1.7.1 uses a Nikuradse’s sand roughness model, while EllipSys3D uses a model based on the atmospheric roughness length. It is found that Nikuradse’s model introduces an error dependent on the near-wall cell height. To mitigate this error the near-wall cells should be at least 10 times larger than the surface roughness. It is nonetheless possible to obtain very similar results between EllipSys3D and OpenFOAM v.1.7.1. The more recent OpenFOAM v.2.2.1, which includes the atmospheric roughness length wall-function approach, has also been tested and compared to the results of OpenFOAM v.1.7.1 and EllipSys3D. The numerical results obtained using the same wall-modeling approach in both EllipSys3D and OpenFOAM v.2.1.1 proved to be almost identical. Two meshing strategies are investigated using HypGrid and SnappyHexMesh. The performance of OpenFOAM on SnappyHexMesh-based low-aspect-ratio unstructured meshes is found to be almost an order of magnitude faster than on HypGrid-based structured and high-aspect-ratio meshes. However, proper control of boundary layer resolution is found to be very difficult when the SnappyHexMesh tool is utilized for grid generation purposes. The OpenFOAM is generally found to be 2–6 times slower than EllipSys3D in achieving numerical results of the same order of accuracy on similar or identical computational meshes, when utilization of EllipSys3D default grid sequencing procedures is included.

Investigation of Turbulent Boundary Layer Flow Over 2D Bump Using Highly Resolved Large Eddy Simulation

A large eddy simulation (LES) study of turbulent non-equilibrium boundary layer flow over 2D Bump, at comparatively low Reynolds number Reh=U∞h/ν=1950, was conducted. A well-known LES issue of obtaining and sustaining turbulent flow inside the computational domain at such low Re, is addressed by conducting a precursor calculation of the spatially developing boundary layer flow. Those results were subsequently used as turbulent inflow database for the main non-equilibrium boundary layer flow computation. The Sagaut (Rech. Aero., pp. 51–63, 1996) sub grid scale (SGS) turbulence model, based on a local estimate of the subgrid scale turbulent kinetic energy ksgs and implicit damping of turbulent SGS viscosity νt(sgs) in the near-wall region, was selected as a suitable basis for the present LES computations due to the fact that block structured MPI parallelized CFD code used in the current computations did not provide a direct possibility for wall-damping of, e.g., the Smagorinsky constant in the near-wall region. The grid utilized in the main calculation consisted of approximately 9.4 × 106 grid points and the boundary layer flow results obtained, regarding both mean flow profiles and turbulence quantities, showed a good agreement with the available laser Doppler anemometry (LDA) measurements. Analysis of the flow was directly able to identify and confirm the existence of internal layers at positions related to the vicinity of the upstream and downstream discontinuities in the surface curvature and also partially confirm a close interdependency between generation and evolution of internal layers and the abrupt changes in the skin friction, previously reported in the literature.

Computational Study of Mean Flow and Turbulence Structure in Inflow System of a Swirl Combustor

Flow structure in the annular section of the inlet system of a tuboannular swirl combustor with respect to the swirl intensity influence was investigated computationally complementary to the recent experimental study by Palm et al. [1]. In addition to the non-swirling case, two different swirling configurations corresponding to the swirl numbers S = 0.6 and 1.0 were considered. The simulations were performed by using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method and a two-layer model scheme hybridizing a near-wall k —e RANS (Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes) model covering the wall layer and LES method in the outer layer employing Smagorinsky model. Special attention was devoted to the position of the interface. An in-depth analysis of the mean velocity and turbulence fields reveals an increasingly asymmetric axial velocity profile in the annular pipe and an appropriately shaped profile of the Reynolds stress components corresponding to the enhanced turbulence production in the outer part of the concentric annulus. The present study also aimes at generation of reliable swirling inflow data for future LES of the flow in the combustor flue.

Microscale model comparison (benchmark) at the moderate complex forested site Ryningsnäs

complex forested site Ryningsnäs Stefan Ivanell1, Johan Arnqvist1, Matias Avila2, Dalibor Cavar3, Roberto Aurelio Chavez-Arroyo4, Hugo Olivares-Espinosa1, Carlos Peralta5, Jamal Adib5, and Björn Witha6 1Uppsala University, Wind Energy Section, Campus Gotland, 621 67 Visby, Sweden 2Barcelona Supercomputing Center, BSC, Spain 3Wind Energy Department, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark 4National Renewable Energy Centre (CENER), Spain 5Wobben Research and Development MS GmbH, Germany 6ForWind Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany Correspondence to: Stefan Ivanell (stefan.ivanell@geo.uu.se)

Results of the GABLS3 diurnal-cycle benchmark for wind energy applications

We present results of the GABLS3 model intercomparison benchmark revisited for wind energy applications. The case consists of a diurnal cycle, measured at the 200-m tall Cabauw tower in the Netherlands, including a nocturnal low-level jet. The benchmark includes a sensitivity analysis of WRF simulations using two input meteorological databases and five planetary boundary-layer schemes. A reference set of mesoscale tendencies is used to drive microscale simulations using RANS k- and LES turbulence models. The validation is based on rotor-based quantities of interest. Cycle-integrated mean absolute errors are used to quantify model performance. The results of the benchmark are used to discuss input uncertainties from mesoscale modelling, different meso-micro coupling strategies (online vs offline) and consistency between RANS and LES codes when dealing with boundary-layer mean flow quantities. Overall, all the microscale simulations produce a consistent coupling with mesoscale forcings.

LES Based POD Analysis of Jet in Cross Flow

The paper presents results of a POD investigation of the LES based numerical simulation of the jet-in-crossflow (JICF) flowfield. LES results are firstly compared to the pointwise LDA measurements. 2D POD analysis is then used as a comparison basis for PIV measurements and LES, and finally 3D POD analysis is conducted on the LES datasets, giving some clear depictions of interaction processes between dominant flow structures pertinent to the JICF flowfield.