Giacomo Valerio Iungo
Mechanical Engineering Department Wind Fluids and Experiments (WindFluX) Laboratory The University of Texas at Dallas,
Understanding the Organization of Atmospheric Turbulence for Wind Energy: LiDAR Measurements, Wind Tunnel Experiments, and Data-driven Modeling
The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is the layer of the atmosphere that is in contact with the earth’s surface and is the source for wind energy harvesting. Mass, momentum, energy, and scalar turbulent fluxes are crucial for the performance of wind turbines, the downwind evolution of their wakes and interactions leading to wind farm wakes, interactions among neighboring wind farms, and even effects on regional meteorology. The ABL can be considered as one of the turbulent boundary layer flows with the largest Reynolds number available terrestrially (Ο(10^6 )), thus it provides a unique opportunity to investigate the organization of turbulent coherent structures and their energy contributions over such a broad scale range, and their interactions with wind turbine rotors and wakes. Furthermore, environmental factors, such as atmospheric thermal stability, terrain topography, and wave characteristics, make ABL investigations unique and complex physics challenges. Atmospheric turbulence and wind energy research at the WindFluX Lab of UT Dallas is typically performed by coupling full-scale field observations performed with the UTD Mobile LiDAR station with accurate measurements performed at the boundary layer test section of the UTD BLAST wind tunnel. Experimental datasets are leveraged to develop analytical, CFD, and data-driven models to predict wind turbulence characteristics of the ABL, wind turbine performance, and wakes. This talk will provide an overview of some recent field campaigns and wind tunnel experiments performed in the realm of both onshore and offshore wind energy.
Bio: Giacomo Valerio Iungo graduated in 2003 with full honors in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Pisa, Italy, and in 2007 he obtained a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the same institution (in collaboration with the CSIR, Pretoria, Rep. South Africa). The contribution of his research activity was recognized by the special mention for the 2010 IAWE-ANIV prize as the best Italian junior researcher in wind engineering. In the period 2010-2014, he was a scientist at EPFL, where he performed wind energy research. In 2014, he was appointed as Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, then Associated Professor with Tenure in 2020. As principal investigator of the WindFluX laboratory, he is actively working in the wind energy domain to develop state-of-the-art facilities, such as a boundary layer wind tunnel and a mobile wind LiDAR station. His research interests lie in understanding the organization of turbulent coherent structures in the atmospheric boundary layer and developing data-driven models to simulate accurately the operations of wind turbines with relatively low computational costs. The research of Dr. Iungo has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, ARPA-E, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and several industrial partners. Dr. Iungo received an NSF CAREER award from the Fluid Dynamics program in 2020.
Oriol Lehmkuhl
Large-scale Computational Fluid Dynamics Group Leader, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Current Trends on Numerical Simulation for the Design of New and Disruptive Aerodynamic Configurations in Wind Energy Applications.
The current status of LES and its readiness for industrial applications were recently discussed in the NASA CFD Vision 2030 report . The report recognised LES with the aid of wall models as one of the pacing items “for developing a visionary CFD capability required by the notional year 2030.” However, at the same time, the report stated that “LES requires additional development of the wall-modeling capability that is currently at a very low technology-readiness level.” This criticism is legitimate, as the use of WMLES has been confined largely in academic research involving relatively low Reynolds number flows over essentially two-dimensional geometries, often having at least one direction of statistical homogeneity. This is hardly the case in real-world. In the last three years, a significant effort has been done in BSC to increase the TRL level of LES by deploying low-dissipation strategies for the simulation of scale resolving turbulent flows into large scale applications.
The talk, will discuss the general strategy followed by BSC covering numerical methods, physical based SGS closures, exploit of novel GPU platforms, integration with ML and wall modelling. The current state in incompressible flows will be analysed using academic wind energy oriented cases like airfoils, full rotor geometries and wind farms. Examples of the LES application in a real word project with Iberdrola and OceanWinds will be given. Finally, prospectives of how to apply similar strategies for compressible flows will be discussed.
Bio: Dr. Oriol Lehmkuhl (male) lead researcher (R4) at the Dept. of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE). He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering by UPC. Dr Lehmkuhl is Ramon y Cajal researcher and leads the Large-scale Computational Fluid Dynamics group in BSC. He has been the co-director of 15 PhD theses (seven of them ongoing)
and 15 master theses, is author of 85 papers in JCR journals (h-index 31), with about 220 contributions to peer-reviewed international conferences and 4 patents. In addition, Dr.
Lehmkuhl has been involved in 26 national and EU financially supported projects (4 coordinated) and has participated in 35 RES research projects, 5 Tier-0 PRACE projects and 1 INCITE project.
Dr. Lehmkuhl's main research interests are turbulence modelling, multi-phase modelling, high-performance computing, multi- physics & multi-scale modelling, aerodynamic simulations, and bio-mechanical modelling. As a result of this research activity Dr. Lehmkuhl has built a strong research network including different Universities (i.e Stanford University, University of
Stuttgart, University of Southampton, Queen's University, etc.), research institutes (i.e Center of Turbulence Research, DLR, ONERA, etc.) and companies (i.e Alstom Wind, Iberdrola, OceanWinds, Grifols, Envision Energy, Total, Gas Natural, Scnema, Liebherr, Abengoa Solar, Fagor, HP, Seat, ITP Aero, RR, Airbus, etc.).
