Spatial Characteristics of Roughness Sublayer Mean Flow and Turbulence Over a Realistic Urban Surface

Single-point measurements from towers in cities cannot properly quantify the impact of all terms in the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budget and are often not representative of horizontally-averaged quantities over the entire urban domain. A series of large-eddy simulations (LES) is here performed to quantify the relevance of non-measurable terms, and to explore the spatial variability of the flow field over and within an urban geometry in the city of Basel, Switzerland. The domain has been chosen to be centered around a tower where single-point turbulence measurements at six heights are available. Buildings are represented through a discrete-forcing immersed boundary method and are based on detailed real geometries from a surveying dataset. The local model results at the tower location compare well against measurements under near-neutral stability conditions and for the two prevailing wind directions chosen for the analysis. This confirms that LES in conjunction with the immersed boundary condition is a valuable model to study turbulence and dispersion within a real urban roughness sublayer (RSL). The simulations confirm that mean velocity profiles in the RSL are characterized by an inflection point zγ located above the average building height zh. TKE in the RSL is primarily produced above zγ, and turbulence is transported down into the urban canopy layer. Pressure transport is found to be significant in the very-near-wall regions. Further, spatial variations of time-averaged variables and non-measurable dispersive terms are important in the RSL above a real urban surface and should therefore be considered in future urban canopy parametrization developments.

Simulation of benchmark and industrial unsteady compressible turbulent fluid flows

Michele Mossi

Large-eddy simulation (LES) is a very promising technique for the numerical computation of unsteady turbulent flows, and seems to be the perfect tool to simulate the compressible air flow around a high-speed train in a tunnel, providing unsteady results for aerodynamic and aeroacoustic analysis. To look into this possible future application of LES, two major lines of investigation are pursued in this thesis: first, the study of the effective ability of shock-capturing schemes to predict fundamental turbulent phenomena; second, the analysis of the aerodynamic phenomena induced by a high-speed train in a tunnel. The numerical simulation of compressible flows requires the use of shock-capturing schemes. These schemes can be relatively dissipative and mask the subgrid-scale contribution introduced in a large-eddy simulation to account for the unresolved turbulence scales. To estimate their effective dissipation and their ability to resolve turbulence phenomena, shock-capturing schemes widely used for aeronautical applications, from second- to fifth-order space accuracy, are employed here for simulating well-known fundamental flows in subsonic and supersonic regimes. Direct and large-eddy numerical simulations are undertaken for the inviscid and viscous Taylor-Green vortex decay problem, the freely decaying homogeneous and isotropic turbulence, and the fully developed channel flow. For all the turbulent flows investigated, several turbulence statistics are computed and the numerical dissipation of the schemes tested is interpreted in terms of subgrid-scale dissipation in a LES context, yielding an equivalent Smagorinsky or dynamic coefficient. This coefficient is for all schemes of the same order of magnitude as the commonly accepted values in LES for the subgrid-scale term. On the grounds of this analysis and of the comparisons of the turbulence statistics with accurate data obtained in the literature, the addition of explicit subgrid-scale models to the shock-capturing schemes tested is not recommended. It is thus concluded that the use of the LES technique for compressible turbulent flows is not yet suitable for industrial applications. The aerodynamic phenomena generated by a high-speed train travelling in a tunnel are also discussed, their importance on the design of high-speed lies is pointed out, and the analysis tools commonly employed for their study are reviewed. To study numerically the three-dimensional, compressible and turbulent air flow around a high-speed train accelerating in a tunnel, by accounting for the unsteady effects at inlet and outlet boundaries due to the propagation of pressure waves generated at the train departure, new coupling conditions between one-dimensional and three-dimensional domains are developed. These conditions are applied successfully to the numerical simulation of the unsteady wake developing behind two- and three-dimensional vehicles, where the averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved with the turbulence modelling approach. The influence on the wake of the length of the vehicle tail is also discussed and results of multi-dimensional simulations are compared with one-dimensional data.

EPFL1999

A scale-dependent Lagrangian dynamic model for large eddy simulation of complex turbulent flows

Charles Vivant Ignacio Meneveau, Marc Parlange

A scale-dependent dynamic subgrid model based on Lagrangian time averaging is proposed and tested in large eddy simulations sLESd of high-Reynolds number boundary layer flows over homogeneous and heterogeneous rough surfaces. The model is based on the Lagrangian dynamic Smagorinsky model in which required averages are accumulated in time, following fluid trajectories of the resolved velocity field. The model allows for scale dependence of the coefficient by including a second test-filtering operation to determine how the coefficient changes as a function of scale. The model also uses the empirical observation that when scale dependence occurs ssuch as when the filter scale approaches the limits of the inertial ranged, the classic dynamic model yields the coefficient value appropriate for the test-filter scale. Validation tests in LES of high Reynolds number, rough wall, boundary layer flow are performed at various resolutions. Results are compared with other eddy-viscosity subgrid-scale models. Unlike the Smagorinsky–Lilly model with wall-damping swhich is overdissipatived or the scale-invariant dynamic model swhich is underdissipatived, the scale-dependent Lagrangian dynamic model is shown to have good dissipation characteristics. The model is also tested against detailed atmospheric boundary layer data that include measurements of the response of the flow to abrupt transitions in wall roughness. For such flows over variable surfaces, the plane-averaged version of the dynamic model is not appropriate and the Lagrangian averaging is desirable. The simulated wall stress overshoot and relaxation after a jump in surface roughness and the velocity profiles at several downstream distances from the jump are compared to the experimental data. Results show that the dynamic Smagorinsky coefficient close to the wall is very sensitive to the underlying local surface roughness, thus justifying the use of the Lagrangian formulation. In addition, the Lagrangian formulation reproduces experimental data more accurately than the planar-averaged formulation in simulations over heterogeneous rough walls.

2005

Large-eddy simulation of a diurnal cycle of the atmospheric boundary layer: Atmospheric stability and scaling issues

Charles Vivant Ignacio Meneveau, Marc Parlange

A simulation of a diurnal cycle of atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) flow over a homogeneous terrain is performed using large-eddy simulation (LES) with the Lagrangian scale-dependent dynamic subgrid-scale model. The surface boundary condition is derived from the field observations of surface heat flux from the HATS experiment (Horst et al., 2004; Kleissl et al., 2004). The simulation results display good general agreement with previous modeling and experimental studies with regard to characteristic features such as growth of the convective boundary layer by entrainment, nocturnal jet, and multilayered flow structure of the nocturnal regime. To gain a better understanding of the physical parameters affecting the statistics of the flow, we study the dependence of a subgrid parameter (dynamic Smagorinsky coefficient), resolved turbulent kinetic energy, and resolved vertical velocity variance upon atmospheric stability. The profiles of these turbulent variables plotted as a function of Obukhov length show “hysteretic” behavior that implies nonunique dependence. The subsequent use of local Richardson number as the scaling parameter shows a decrease in this “hysteresis,” but there is an increased scatter in the profiles with increasing height. Conversely, profiles plotted as a function of local Obukhov length (based on the fluxes at the local vertical level) show almost no hysteresis, confirming the validity of Nieuwstadt's local scaling hypothesis. Although the local scaling hypothesis was formulated for the stable boundary layer, we find that it applies to the entire stability range of the diurnal cycle.

American Geophysical Union2006

A scale-dependent Lagrangian dynamic model for large eddy simulation of complex turbulent flows

Charles Vivant Ignacio Meneveau, Marc Parlange

2005

Simulation of benchmark and industrial unsteady compressible turbulent fluid flows

Michele Mossi

EPFL1999