Large-eddy simulation of dispersion: comparison between elevated source and ground level source

Abstract

Large-eddy simulation (LES) is used to calculate the concentration fluctuations of passive plumes from an elevated source (ES) and a ground-level source (GLS) in a turbulent boundary layer over a rough wall. The mean concentration, relative fluctuations and spectra are found to be in good agreement with the wind-tunnel measurements for both ES and GLS. In particular, the calculated relative fluctuation level for GLS is quite satisfactory, suggesting that the LES is reliable and the calculated instantaneous data can be used for further post-processing. Animations are shown of the meandering of the plumes, which is one of the main features to the numerical simulations. Extreme value theory (EVT), in the form of the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD), is applied to model the upper tail of the probability density function of the concentration time series collected at many typical locations for GLS and ES from both LES and experiments. The relative maxima (defined as maximum concentration normalized by the local mean concentration) and return levels estimated from the numerical data are in good agreement with those from the experimental data. The relative maxima can be larger than 50. The success of the comparisons suggests that we can achieve significant insight into the physics of dispersion in turbulent flows by combining LES and EVT.

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ORCID for Zhengtong Xie: orcid.org/0000-0002-8119-7532

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