MMAE Seminar - Using Large Eddy Simulations of Large Wind Farms to Develop Better Engineering Models - Midwest Mechanics Series
Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Charles Meneveau, Louis M. Sardella Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science at Johns Hopkins University, to campus on Wednesday, April 29th, to present his lecture, Using Large Eddy Simulations of Large Wind Farms to Develop Better Engineering Models.
Abstract
Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of turbulent flows have proven to be valuable to better understand complex turbulent flows. Here we deploy this technique to better understand and develop engineering models for flow in large wind farms. As wind energy is characterized by low power density, for wind energy to significantly contribute to our overall energy supply, very large wind farms (on or off-shore) need to be envisioned. For very large wind farms, interesting couplings with atmospheric boundary layers become important. This presentation will summarize our results that focus on understanding how wind turbines, when deployed in large arrays, extract kinetic energy from the atmospheric boundary layer. A suite of LES, in which wind turbines are modeled using the classical 'actuator disk' concept, is performed for various wind turbine arrangements, turbine loading factors, and surface roughness values. The results are used to develop improved models for effective roughness lengths and to obtain new predictions for optimal spacing distances among wind turbines in a large wind farm. We use the results also to develop a new wake superposition model, the coupled wake boundary layer (CWBL) approach, as an update to the classic Jensen/Park model. It enables capturing the interactions of the turbine wakes with the atmosphere. Finally, if time permits, we introduce the notion of generalized transport tubes as a new tool for flow visualization that is particularly useful for analyzing the spatial transport of particular physical quantities (e.g., kinetic energy arriving at a particular wind turbine). This work is a collaboration with colleagues, postdocs, and students involved in the WINDINSPIRE project and is supported by the US National Science Foundation.
Biography
Charles Meneveau is the Louis M. Sardella Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He also serves as deputy director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) at Johns Hopkins, Deputy Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Turbulence.
He received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1985 and M.S, M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1987, 1988 and 1989, respectively. During 1989/90 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University/NASA Ames’ Center for Turbulence Research.
Professor Meneveau has been on the Johns Hopkins faculty since 1990. His area of research is focused on understanding and modeling hydrodynamic turbulence, and complexity in fluid mechanics in general. He combines experimental, computational, and theoretical tools for his research. At present, he is interested in the fluid dynamics of large wind farms, public databases, subgrid and wall modeling for Large Eddy Simulations, and various applications of LES. With his students and co-workers, he has authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles.
Professor Meneveau is a foreign corresponding member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics, the U.S. American Physical Society, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He received the inaugural Stanley Corrsin Award from the American Physical Society (2011), the 2011 J. Cole Award from AIAA, the 2004 UCAR Outstanding Publication award (with students and other colleagues at JHU and NCAR), the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association’s Excellence in Teaching Award (2003), and the APS’ François N. Frenkiel Award for Fluid Mechanics (2001). In the past, he has served as a member of the Editorial Committee of the Annual Reviews of Fluid Mechanics and as an Associate Editor for the Physics of Fluids.
Image: Simulated wind-farm turbulence: volume rendering of low-velocity wake regions. Dr. Richard Stevens performed the simulations with the JHU-LES code. Visualization courtesy of David Bock (NCSA, XSEDE, Extended Collaborative Support Services).