Near-wall approximations to speed up simulations for atmosphere boundary layers in the presence of forests using lattice Boltzmann method on GPU
Preprint, 2022

Forests play an important role in influencing the wind resource in atmospheric boundary layers and the fatigue life of wind turbines. Due to turbulence, a difficulty in the simulation of the forest effects is that flow statistical and fluctuating content should be accurately resolved using a turbulence-resolved CFD method, which requires a large amount of computing time and resources. In this paper, we demonstrate a fast but accurate simulation platform that uses a lattice Boltzmann method with large eddy simulation on Graphic Processing Units (GPU). The simulation tool is the open-source program, GASCANS, developed at the University of Manchester. The simulation platform is validated based on canonical wall-bounded turbulent flows. A forest is modelled in the form of body forces injected near the wall. Since a uniform cell size is applied throughout the computational domain, the averaged first-layer cell height over the wall reaches to ⟨Δy+⟩=165. Simulation results agree well with previous experiments and numerical data obtained from finite volume methods. We demonstrate that good results are possible without the use of a wall-function, since the forest forces overwhelm wall friction. This is shown to hold as long as the forest region is resolved with several cells. In addition to the GPU speedup, the approximations also significantly benefit the computation efficiency.

Author

Xinyuan Shao

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Marine Technology

Marta Camps Santasmasas

University of Manchester

Xiao Xue

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Fluid Dynamics

Jiqiang Niu

Jiaotong University

Jilin University

Lars Davidson

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Fluid Dynamics

Alistair J Revell

University of Manchester

Huadong Yao

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Fluid Dynamics

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Areas of Advance

Transport

Energy

Subject Categories

Aerospace Engineering

Applied Mechanics

Energy Engineering

Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics

Infrastructure

C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)

DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2206.15454

More information

Latest update

2/24/2023