Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this article, the Ryningsnäs site in Sweden is investigated using large eddy simulation with three different clearing setups: a homogeneous forest, that is, no clearing, the current clearing, that is, the existing clearing at the location, and an extended clearing. Neutral stratification is simulated, and the wind turbines are modelled by a two‐way‐coupled actuator line model. From the simulations, the electrical generator power was found to be the highest for the current clearing. But the fatigue loads were both higher and lower than the homogeneous forest depending on which part of the wind turbine that was investigated. The extended clearing nearly always had the lowest fatigue loads but unfortunately also the lowest electrical generator power. Further optimization of the clearings and the wind turbine locations in relation to them is needed to find the sweet spot where the fatigue loads are lower and the electrical generator power is higher.

Data-driven approaches offer novel opportunities for improving the performance of turbulent flow simulations, which are critical to wide-ranging applications from wind farms and aerodynamic designs to weather and climate forecasting. However, current methods for these simulations often require large amounts of data and computational resources. While data-driven methods have been extensively applied to the continuum Navier-Stokes equations, limited work has been done to integrate these methods with the highly scalable lattice Boltzmann method. Here, we present a physics-informed neural network framework for improving lattice Boltzmann-based simulations of near-wall turbulent flow. Using a small amount of data and integrating physical constraints, our model accurately predicts flow behaviour at a wide range of friction Reynolds numbers up to 1.0 × 10 6 . In contradistinction with other models that use direct numerical simulation datasets, this approach reduces data requirements by three orders of magnitude and allows for sparse grid configurations. Our work broadens the scope of lattice Boltzmann applications, enabling efficient large-scale simulations of turbulent flow in diverse contexts. The authors provide a data-driven near-wall modelling framework for the lattice Boltzmann method using IDDES data. Their model can predict flows with friction Reynolds numbers up to 1,000,000 and effectively handle sparse near-wall grids.

In this study, unsteady low-frequency characteristics in a voluteless low-speed centrifugal fan operating at a high mass flow rate are studied with improved delayed detached eddy simulation (IDDES). This study is motivated by a recent finding that the non-uniformly distributed pressure inside this type of fan could be alleviated by improving the gap geometry. The present simulation results show that the velocity magnitudes of the gap have distinct low and high regions. Intensive turbulent structures are developed in the low-velocity regions and are swept downstream along the intersection between the blade and shroud, on the pressure side of the blade. Eventually, the turbulence gives rise to a high-pressure region near the blade’s trailing edge. This unsteady flow behavior revolves around the fan rotation axis. Additionally, its period is 5% of the fan rotation speed, based on the analysis of the time history of the gap velocity magnitudes and the evolution of the high-pressure region. The same frequency of high pressure was also found in previous experimental measurements. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the trigger of the gap turbulence, i.e., the unsteady local low velocity, has been determined.

In this paper, the simulation and modeling of the turbulent atmospheric boundary layers (ABLs) in the presence of forests are studied using a lattice Boltzmann method with large eddy simulation, which was implemented in the open-source program GASCANS with the use of Graphic Processing Units (GPU). A method of modeling forests in the form of body forces injected near the wall is revisited, while the effects of leaf area density (LAD) on the model accuracy is further addressed. Since a uniform cell size is applied throughout the computational domain, the wall-normal height of the near-wall cells is very large, theoretically requiring a wall function to model the boundary layer. However, the wall function is disregarded here when the forest is modeled. This approximation is validated based on the comparison with previous experimental and numerical data. It concludes that for the ABL conditions specified in this study as well as a large body of literature, the forest forces overwhelm the wall friction so that the modeling of the latter effect is trivial. Constant and varying LAD profiles across the forest zone are defined with the same total leaf area despite the varying one being studied previously. It is found that the two LAD profiles provide consistent predictions. The present forest modeling can therefore be simplified with the use of the constant LAD without degrading the model accuracy remarkably.

We study noise generation at the blade tips of propellers designed for future electric aircraft propulsion and, furthermore, analyze the interrelationship between noise mitigation and aerodynamics improvement in terms of propeller geometric designs. Classical propellers with three or six blades and a conceptual propeller with three joined dual-blades are compared to understand the effects of blade tip vortices on the noise generation and aerodynamics. The dual blade of the conceptual propeller is constructed by joining the tips of two sub-blades. These propellers are designed to operate under the same freestream flow conditions and similar electric power consumption. The Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (IDDES) is adopted for the flow simulation to identify high-resolution time-dependent noise sources around the blade tips. The acoustic computations use a time-domain method based on the convective Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings (FW-H) equation. The thrust of the 3-blade conceptual propeller is 4% larger than the 3-blade classical propeller and 8% more than the 6-blade one, given that they have similar efficiencies. Blade tip vortices are found emitting broadband noise. Since the classical and conceptual 3-blade propellers have different geometries, especially at the blade tips, they introduce deviations in the vortex development. However, the differences are small regarding the broadband noise generation. As compared to the 6-blade classical propeller, both 3-blade propellers produce much larger noise. The reason is that the increased number of blades leads to the reduced strength of tip vortices. The findings indicate that the noise mitigation through the modification of the blade design and number can be traded-off by the changed aerodynamic performance.

In this study, three voluteless centrifugal fans are compared for their aeroacoustic performances. The tonal noise is predicted by coupling the IDDES with Formulation 1A of Farassat. The sources of the tonal noise at the blade passing frequency (BPF) are identified. It is found that the sources are related to the fan inlet gap, which introduces higher velocity intensities and turbulent fluctuations interacting with the blade leading edge. By redesigning the gap, the tonal noise at the BPF is reduced effectively.

A dissipative scale-similarity subgrid model was recently proposed in which only the dissipative part of the subgrid stresses was added to the momentum equations. This was achieved by adding the gradient of a subgrid stress only when its sign agreed with that of the corresponding viscous term. In the present work, this idea is used the other way around as forcing in hybrid large eddy simulation-Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes: only the part of a subgrid stress term that corresponds to back scatter is added to the momentum equations. The forcing triggers resolved turbulence in the transition region between the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes and large eddy simulation regions. The new approach is evaluated for fully developed channel flow at Re τ =4000. It is found that the forcing indeed does increase the resolved turbulence in the transition region. The magnitude of the production (i.e. back scatter) due to forcing in the equation for resolved kinetic energy is of the order of that due to the usual strain-rate production term. The present approach of using back scatter from a scale-similarity model can also probably be useful for triggering transition.

Direct numerical simulations of a turbulent channel flow at low Reynolds number ( R e τ = 180 , based on the driving pressure gradient and channel half width) are performed. Some results are also presented for R e τ = 400 . In this work we apply an idealized spanwise Lorentz force near the lower wall of the channel and compare the results for the applied force and no-force cases in both the upper half and the lower half of the channel. We have studied two-point correlations to explain the effect of the Lorentz force on streamwise vortices and streaky structures. Despite the observation of clear stabilization of the streaky structures in the vicinity of the wall, the existence of the streamwise vortices is explained by the well-known turbulence regeneration cycle, which improves the understanding of streaky and streamwise vortex structure formation on turbulence generation. Spanwise oscillating Lorentz force effects on the Rankine vortex structures are investigated. Our results lead us to establish an explanation on the effect of sweep and ejection events on the mean vortex structures in the flow field. A mean vortex structure is defined by the time-averaged location of the local minimum and maximum of the streamwise r.m.s. vorticity. We also depict turbulence production rates for both cases and compared the lower and upper half of the channel.

A number of large-eddy simulations (LES) are performed for the calculation of the airflow over a horizontally homogeneous forest canopy for a wide range of thermal stability classes. For the first time, results from LES of a stably stratified canopy are also presented. Simulation results compare favourably to recent field measurements over a pine forest in south-eastern Sweden. The simple heat source model was found to perform adequately and to yield within-canopy heat-flux profiles typically observed for stable conditions in the field. Evidence was found for a layer of unstably stratified air in the canopy trunk space under stable stratification. The importance of a secondary wind-speed maximum is emphasized in stable conditions. Examination of the budget equation of turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) revealed that, during stable stratification, pressure transport plays an increasingly important role in supplying the canopy region with TKE.

Large Eddy simulations of the Lemnhult wind farm in Sweden are compared to LiDAR measurements of the site. Two scans have been performed, one in southerly direction in order to investigate the flow over a forest, another one in westerly direction, in order to investigate the flow over a clearing. A forest model is implemented in STAR-CCM+ using the local forest height data, while assuming flat terrain in one simulation and including the terrain height in another to investigate its effect for each scan. The complex terrain simulations show the best agreement with the measurements. Uncertainty of the stratification of the measurements can be the reason for some of the difference. The vertical wind speed for the clearing scan change considerably when the terrain representation is included, but the magnitude is however still low compared to the horizontal velocity. This shows the importance of including terrain for simulations with variation in terrain height. The normalized turbulent kinetic energy for the vertical profiles show a decrease in the clearing scan compared to the forest scan which should be beneficial for wind turbines.