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Wind energy is a growing concern over the present awareness of lethal impact of green house gas emission. This energy source has been proven a promising alternative to fossil fuel based energy. Increased onshore wind capacity and decreased amount of low roughness wind sites has inspired the wind energy researchers to explore the possibilities of wind energy from high roughness sites such as urban area. Moreover, exhausted grid capacity between the wind energy producer from remote area and the consumer at city is also a major constrain for wind energy expansion. Driven by such motivation, this thesis has explored possibilities of wind energy conversion from buildings where energy is needed the most. Urban topography is known to be highly turbulent region considering its roughness characteristics.
Wind energy yield from urban aerodynamics is a vast arena of experimental research. Within the time frame of the thesis period and available opportunities, a brief description about the wind energy assessment modelling approach from urban flow was outlined. There are several possibilities of wind energy yield from the built structure, but only building integrated duct was focused in this thesis.
Time-averaged and global wind speed on the building integrated ducts, flow around the buildings was measured from wind tunnel and numerical analysis. Available wind energy yield and turbulence present in the locations measured from the flow was calculated based on the wind tunnel data and summarized with the pros and cons of the particular geometry. Elliptical duct configuration was found to achieve maximum energy yield from the omnidirectional free stream flow. However, simple rectangular duct configuration was determined as most efficient and optimized considering its simplicity, financial feasibility and relative energy yield with other duct configuration. The thesis also showed that on roof configuration is also very promising for wind energy exploration from the omnidirectional free stream flow.
Necessary recommendations were made based on available result for future development of the research approach. Scope and opportunities was mentioned. This investigation has proved that it is possible to extract limited amount of wind energy from building augmented ducts using concentrator effect of the building exterior. Thus, the thesis concluded that the wind energy yield from building augmented ducts using the concentrator effect of the building exterior is a promising renewable energy source.
A front-tracking algorithm for large-eddy simulation (LES) is developed to untangle the numerical and physical contributions to entrainment in stratocumulus-topped boundary layers. The front-tracking algorithm is based on the level set method. Instead of resolving the cloud-top inversion, it is represented as a discontinuous interface separating the boundary layer from the free atmosphere. The location of the interface is represented as an isosurface of an evolving marker function the evolution of which is governed by an additional transport equation. The algorithm has been implemented in an existing LES code based on the anelastic approximation of the Navier-Stokes equations.
The original LES algorithm is verified against direct-numerical simulation (DNS) data of an idealized two-dimensional cloud-top mixing layer. For this, the subgrid-scale model of the LES code was replaced by a constant molecular viscosity in order to focus on numerical errors only. A grid convergence study confirmed the anticipated global second-order rate of convergence and the convergence to the DNS solution. The slower convergence of the LES code as compared to the higher-order DNS yielded leading-order errors in the mixing layer growth at the coarsest resolutions, which were finer still than typical LES resolutions.
The front-tracking algorithm is verified by LESs of two different convective atmospheric boundary layers: the smoke cloud, a solely radiatively driven boundary layer, and a stratocumulus-topped boundary layer based on data from the DYCOMS II field study. Specifying zero entrainment, it was shown that entrainment in LES can be controlled effectively by the front-tracking algorithm. The algorithm drastically reduces entrainment errors and reduces dependencies of the solution to numerical parameters such as the choice of flux-limiters and grid resolution.