Evaluating the Accuracy of RANS Wind Flow Modeling Over Forested Terrain. Part 2: Impact on Capacity Factor for Moderately Complex Topography

2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Viridiana G. Morales Garza ◽  
Jonathon Sumner ◽  
Jörn Nathan ◽  
Christian Masson

Abstract This study evaluates the uncertainty in speed-up factors predicted using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes equations to model flow over moderately complex forested terrain and considers its effect on the uncertainty in wind energy calculations. All simulations are solved using the open-source software openfoam v.2.4.0 with a modified k–ε turbulence closure. The forest drag effect is calculated with two models: a displacement height model and a canopy model that estimates the pressure loss due to the forest through analogy with porous media. Two years of concurrent wind data from three meteorological masts at a potential wind farm site in Canada are used for validation purposes. In all, these experimental data are compared with the predictions of four wind flow models: (A) a terrain only model, (B) a displacement height model, (C) a uniform forest canopy model, and (D) a non-uniform forest canopy model. Overall, the canopy models provide better agreement with the mean statistical results than the displacement height model. In this case, the 2.76% uncertainty in the speed-up factor associated with the wind flow predictions of the non-uniform forest distribution model leads to an uncertainty in the energy calculation of just 5.94%.

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 388
Author(s):  
Riccardo De Blasis ◽  
Giovanni Batista Masala ◽  
Filippo Petroni

The energy produced by a wind farm in a given location and its associated income depends both on the wind characteristics in that location—i.e., speed and direction—and the dynamics of the electricity spot price. Because of the evidence of cross-correlations between wind speed, direction and price series and their lagged series, we aim to assess the income of a hypothetical wind farm located in central Italy when all interactions are considered. To model these cross and auto-correlations efficiently, we apply a high-order multivariate Markov model which includes dependencies from each time series and from a certain level of past values. Besides this, we used the Raftery Mixture Transition Distribution model (MTD) to reduce the number of parameters to get a more parsimonious model. Using data from the MERRA-2 project and from the electricity market in Italy, we estimate the model parameters and validate them through a Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that the simulated income faithfully reproduces the empirical income and that the multivariate model also closely reproduces the cross-correlations between the variables. Therefore, the model can be used to predict the income generated by a wind farm.


2010 ◽  
Vol 297-301 ◽  
pp. 924-929
Author(s):  
Inès Bhouri Baouab ◽  
Nejla Mahjoub Said ◽  
Hatem Mhiri ◽  
Georges Le Palec ◽  
Philippe Bournot

The present work consists in a numerical examination of the dispersion of pollutants discharged from a bent chimney and crossing twin similar cubic obstacles placed in the lee side of the source. The resulting flow is assumed to be steady, three-dimensional and turbulent. Its modelling is based upon the resolution of the Navier Stokes equations by means of the finite volume method together with the RSM (Reynolds Stress Model) turbulent model. This examination aims essentially at detailing the wind flow perturbations, the recirculation and turbulence generated by the presence of the twin cubic obstacles placed tandem at different spacing distances (gaps): W = 4 h, W = 2 h and W = 1 h where W is the distance separating both buildings.


2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 109-114
Author(s):  
YANG-YAO NIU ◽  
SHOU-CHENG TCHENG

In this study, a parallel computing technology is applied on the simulation of aortic blood flow problems. A third-order upwind flux extrapolation with a dual-time integration method based on artificial compressibility solver is used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. The original FORTRAN code is converted to the MPI code and tested on a 64-CPU IBM SP2 parallel computer and a 32-node PC Cluster. The test results show that a significant reduction of computing time in running the model and a super-linear speed up rate is achieved up to 32 CPUs at PC cluster. The speed up rate is as high as 49 for using IBM SP2 64 processors. The test shows very promising potential of parallel processing to provide prompt simulation of the current aortic flow problems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (04) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Wanwan Li

In mechanical engineering educations, simulating fluid thermodynamics is rather helpful for students to understand the fluid’s natural behaviors. However, rendering both high-quality and realtime simulations for fluid dynamics are rather challenging tasks due to their intensive computations. So, in order to speed up the simulations, we have taken advantage of GPU acceleration techniques to simulate interactive fluid thermodynamics in real-time. In this paper, we present an elegant, basic, but practical OpenGL/SL framework for fluid simulation with a heat map rendering. By solving Navier-Stokes equations coupled with the heat diffusion equation, we validate our framework through some real-case studies of the smoke-like fluid rendering such as their interactions with moving obstacles and their heat diffusion effects. As shown in Fig. 1, a group of experimental results demonstrates that our GPU-accelerated solver of Navier-Stokes equations with heat transfer could give the observers impressive real-time and realistic rendering results.


Author(s):  
Aaron F. Shinn ◽  
S. P. Vanka

A semi-implicit pressure based multigrid algorithm for solving the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations was implemented on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). The multigrid method employed was the Full Approximation Scheme (FAS), which is used for solving nonlinear equations. This algorithm is applied to the 2D driven cavity problem and compared to the CPU version of the code (written in Fortran) to assess computational speed-up.


Author(s):  
Gonçalo Mendonça ◽  
Frederico Afonso ◽  
Fernando Lau

The need of the aerospace industry, at national or European level, of faster yet reliable computational fluid dynamics models is the main drive for the application of model reduction techniques. This need is linked to the time cost of high-fidelity models, rendering them inefficient for applications like multi-disciplinary optimization. With the goal of testing and applying model reduction to computational fluid dynamics models applicable to lifting surfaces, a bibliographical research covering reduction of nonlinear, dynamic, or steady models was conducted. This established the prevalence of projection and least mean squares methods, which rely on solutions of the original high-fidelity model and their proper orthogonal decomposition to work. Other complementary techniques such as adaptive sampling, greedy sampling, and hybrid models are also presented and discussed. These projection and least mean squares methods are then tested on simple and documented benchmarks to estimate the error and speed-up of the reduced order models thus generated. Dynamic, steady, nonlinear, and multiparametric problems were reduced, with the simplest version of these methods showing the most promise. These methods were later applied to single parameter problems, namely the lid-driven cavity with incompressible Navier–Stokes equations and varying Reynolds number, and the elliptic airfoil at varying angles of attack for compressible Euler flow. An analysis of the performance of these methods is given at the end of this article, highlighting the computational speed-up obtained with these techniques, and the challenges presented by multiparametric problems and problems showing point singularities in their domain.


2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaa S. Hasan ◽  
Tarek Elgammal ◽  
Randall S. Jackson ◽  
Ryoichi S. Amano

Abstract This research provides an in-depth analysis of the flow around the rotor and in the wake of a single horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) model at different free stream velocities and tip speed ratios (TSRs). Moreover, it extracts some recommendations that might be beneficial for large-scale projects such as wind farm layout design and power output prediction. For this purpose, modeling and experimental testing of a wind tunnel test section, including a single wind turbine model inside were created and validated against present experimental data of the same model. The large Eddy simulation (LES) was used as a numerical approach to model the Navier–Stokes equations. The computational domain was divided into two areas: rotational and stationary. The unsteady rigid body motion (RBM) model was adopted to represent the rotor rotation accurately.


2014 ◽  
Vol 953-954 ◽  
pp. 443-447
Author(s):  
Jia Yuan Yang ◽  
Yu Mo Woo ◽  
Ke Sheng ◽  
Yu Hui Tang

Abstract. For a mountain wind farm in southern China, the paper used CFD software, METEODYN WT, to simulate the wind in all directions to assess their speed-up factor, turbulence intensity, inflow angle and horizontal deviation caused by the terrain. The turbulence intensity, the horizontal deviation and the inflow angle in the met-mast position should be low or small, and the speed-up factor should be able to represent the average level of all the wind turbine sites. The positional relationship of the wind turbine and met-mast is reference to IEC61400-12-1. The paper provided two optional areas.


2011 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Jafari ◽  
N. Chokani ◽  
R. S. Abhari

The accurate modeling of the wind resource over complex terrain is required to optimize the micrositing of wind turbines. In this paper, an immersed boundary method that is used in connection with the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations with k-ω turbulence model in order to efficiently simulate the wind flow over complex terrain is presented. With the immersed boundary method, only one Cartesian grid is required to simulate the wind flow for all wind directions, with only the rotation of the digital elevation map. Thus, the lengthy procedure of generating multiple grids for conventional rectangular domain is avoided. Wall functions are employed with the immersed boundary method in order to relax the stringent near-wall grid resolution requirements as well as to allow the effects of surface roughness to be accounted for. The immersed boundary method is applied to the complex terrain test case of Bolund Hill. The simulation results of wind speed and turbulent kinetic energy show good agreement with experiments for heights greater than 5 m above ground level.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Bilal ◽  
Narendran Sridhar ◽  
Guillermo Araya ◽  
Sivapathas Parameswaran ◽  
Yngve Birkelund

The understanding of atmospheric flows is crucial in the analysis of dispersion of a contaminant or pollutant, wind energy and air-quality assessment to name a few. Additionally, the effects of complex terrain and associated orographic forcing are crucial in wind energy production. Furthermore, the use of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations in the analysis of complex terrain is still considered the “workhorse” since millions of mesh points are required to accurately capture the details of the surface. On the other hand, solving the same problem by means of the instantaneous governing equations of the flow (i.e., in a suite of DNS or LES) would imply almost prohibitive computational resources. In this study, numerical predictions of atmospheric boundary layers are performed over a complex topography located in Nygårdsfjell, Norway. The Nygårdsfjell wind farm is located in a valley at approximately 420 meters above sea level surrounded by mountains in the north and south near the Swedish border. Majority of the winds are believed to be originated from Torneträsk lake in the east which is covered with ice during the winter time. The air closest to the surface on surrounding mountains gets colder and denser. The air then slides down the hill and accumulates over the lake. Later, the air spills out westward towards Ofotfjord through the broader channel that directs and transforms it into highly accelerated winds. Consequently, one of the objectives of the present article is to study the influence of local terrain on shaping these winds over the wind farm. It is worth mentioning that we are not considering any wind turbine model in the present investigation, being the main purpose to understand the influence of the local surface topography and roughness on the wind flow. Nevertheless, future research will include modeling the presence of a wind turbine and will be published elsewhere. The governing equations of the flow are solved by using a RANS approach and by considering three different two-equation turbulence models: k-omega (k–ω), k-epsilon (k–ε) and shear stress transport (SST). Furthermore, the real topographical characteristics of the terrain have been modeled by extracting the required area from the larger digital elevation model (DEM) spanning over 100 km square. The geometry is then extruded using Rhino and meshed in ANSYS Fluent. The terrain dimensions are approximately 2000×1000 meter square.


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