ProLB: A Lattice Boltzmann Solver of Large‐Eddy Simulation for Atmospheric Boundary Layer Flows

Abstract

The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) ranges from hundreds of meters to several kilometers depending on meteorological conditions, mainly wind, temperature, and humidity. Thus, structure of ABL is modified by the daily cycle of heating and cooling over Earth's surface producing three canonical types of boundary layers: convective or unstable, neutral, and stable boundary layers. Convective boundary layer is commonly observed during day when the surface is heated by the sun resulting in a positive buoyancy force, while stable boundary layer occurs during night when surface is cooled by radiation producing a negative buoyancy force, and neutral boundary layer is the case between the former two with little or no buoyancy. The structure of ABL has an important effect on anthropic activities such as mesoscale weather forecasting or pollutant dispersion in urban areas (Fernando et al., 2001). To better understand ABL and related urban processes, numerical simulation is a good complement to field measurements and wind tunnel experiments (Blocken, 2015). In the past much attention has been paid to the accurate CFD modeling of the ABL, both using Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes and large-eddy simulation (LES) approaches. LES (Sagaut, 2006), which is a high-fidelity approach for the unsteady simulation of turbulent flows, has been successfully applied to simulation of ABL (e.g.,

A unified hybrid lattice-Boltzmann method for compressible flows: Bridging between pressure-based and density-based methods

“…This equation established a formal link between collided populations Eqs. (8,15). Now that collision was analyzed, the streaming step of both models can be linked using Eq.…”

“…They are naturally obtained considering the truncation of direct expansion of the continuous Maxwellian onto Hermite polynomial basis 3 . These methods have been observed to be very efficient for low-Mach athermal flows [4][5][6][7][8] , their use for the type of flows mentioned above is much less satisfactory, since both robustness and accuracy issues have been reported in several cases. This is especially true for high speed supersonic flows and multiphase flows with high density ratio.…”

Lattice Boltzmann Method-Based Simulations of Pollutant Dispersion and Urban Physics

“…Since the LBM exhibits the same turbulent closure problems as the Navier-Stokesbased methods, classical subgrid models and wall models (WMs) for atmospheric flow simulations (including neutral, convective and stable cases) are used in the present solver, leading to the definition of the present HRR-LBM-WMLES tool for atmospheric flow simulation. Details are omitted here for the sake of brevity and can be found in Feng et al's work [24].…”

“…For this configuration, HRR-LBM-WMLES simulations considered a δx = 40 m grid with δt = 0.27 s. The Monin Obukhov similarity theory was used as the surface model of the horizontal momentum components, temperature and humidity, and additional sources terms were added to the model to represent the large scale effects that cannot be included in LES. Details of the model settings can be found in Feng et al's work [24,25].…”

Evaluation of a lattice Boltzmann-based wind-turbine actuator line model against a Navier-Stokes approach

“…Lattice Boltzmann-based approaches constitute a relevant alternative. There are no fundamental limitations for lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to deal with atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) flows and wind turbine modelling capabilities with the same precision as Navier-Stokes (NS)-based approaches, as demonstrated in [6,7,8]. Furthermore, they exhibit much lower computational costs and are well-adapted to large-scale heterogeneous architectures.…”