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

Abstract

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 $\langle Δy^+\rangle = 165$. 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.