97,809 research outputs found
Quantifying uncertainty in acoustic measurements of tidal flows using a ‘Virtual’ Doppler Current Profiler
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.Accurate characterisation of flows at tidal sites can enable the developers of tidal stream energy projects to design and model the loads on, and the performance of, tidal energy converters. Acoustic Doppler technology is versatile in the measurement of sea conditions; however, this technology can be limited in its effectiveness at measuring the small-scale kinematic fluctuations caused by waves and turbulence. A Virtual Doppler Current Profiler (VDCP) is used to sample a simulated tidal flow to understand the limitations of this type of measurement instrument whilst recording the small timescale kinematics of waves and turbulence in tidal currents. Results demonstrate the phase dependency of velocity measurements averaged between two acoustic beams and provide a theoretical error for wave and turbulence characteristics sampled under a range of conditions. Spectral moments of the subsurface longitudinal wave orbital velocities recorded by the VDCP can be between 0.1 and 9 times those measured at a point for certain turbulent current conditions, turbulence intensity measurements may vary between 0.2 and 1.5 times the inputted value in low wave conditions and turbulence length scale calculation can also vary hugely dependent on both current and wave conditions. The continuation of this work will enable effective comparison of a linear model for tidal flow kinematics against field measurements from UK tidal site data, and subsequently validate numerical models for the testing of tidal turbines.This work was supported by the Industrial Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy (IDCORE) with funding from the Energy Technologies Institute and the Research Councils Energy Programme [grant number EP/J500847/1] and DNV GL
Identifying optical turbulence profiles for realistic tomographic error in adaptive optics
For extremely large telescopes, adaptive optics will be required to correct the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The performance of tomographic adaptive optics is strongly dependent on the vertical distribution (profile) of this turbulence. An important way in which this manifests is the tomographic error, arising from imperfect measurement and reconstruction of the turbulent phase at altitude. Conventionally, a small number of reference profiles are used to obtain this error in simulation; however these profiles are not constructed to be representative in terms of tomographic error. It is therefore unknown whether these simulations are providing realistic performance estimates. Here, we employ analytical adaptive optics simulation that drastically reduces computation times to compute tomographic error for 10 691 measurements of the turbulence profile gathered by the Stereo-SCIDAR instrument at ESO Paranal. We assess for the first time the impact of the profile on tomographic error in a statistical manner. We find, in agreement with previous work, that the tomographic error is most directly linked with the distribution of turbulence into discrete, stratified layers. Reference profiles are found to provide mostly higher tomographic error than expected, which we attribute to the fact that these profiles are primarily composed of averages of many measurements resulting in unrealistic, continuous distributions of turbulence. We propose that a representative profile should be defined with respect to a particular system, and that as such simulations with a large statistical sample of profiles must be an important step in the design process
Airborne forward pointing UV Rayleigh lidar for remote clear air turbulence (CAT) detection: system design and performance
A high-performance airborne UV Rayleigh lidar system was developed within the
European project DELICAT. With its forward-pointing architecture it aims at
demonstrating a novel detection scheme for clear air turbulence (CAT) for an
aeronautics safety application. Due to its occurrence in clear and clean air at
high altitudes (aviation cruise flight level), this type of turbulence evades
microwave radar techniques and in most cases coherent Doppler lidar techniques.
The present lidar detection technique relies on air density fluctuations
measurement and is thus independent of backscatter from hydrometeors and
aerosol particles. The subtle air density fluctuations caused by the turbulent
air flow demand exceptionally high stability of the setup and in particular of
the detection system. This paper describes an airborne test system for the
purpose of demonstrating this technology and turbulence detection method: a
high-power UV Rayleigh lidar system is installed on a research aircraft in a
forward-looking configuration for use in cruise flight altitudes. Flight test
measurements demonstrate this unique lidar system being able to resolve air
density fluctuations occurring in light-to-moderate CAT at 5 km or moderate CAT
at 10 km distance. A scaling of the determined stability and noise
characteristics shows that such performance is adequate for an application in
commercial air transport.Comment: 17 pages, 19 figures. Pre-publish to Applied Optics (OSA
Route diversity analyses for free-space optical wireless links within turbulent scenarios
Free-Space Optical (FSO) communications link performance is highly affected when propagating through the time-spatially variable turbulent environment. In order to improve signal reception, several mitigation techniques have been proposed and analytically investigated. This paper presents experimental results for the route diversity technique evaluations for a specific case when several diversity links intersects a common turbulent area and concurrently each passing regions with different turbulence flows
Infinite impulse response modal filtering in visible adaptive optics
Diffraction limited resolution adaptive optics (AO) correction in visible
wavelengths requires a high performance control. In this paper we investigate
infinite impulse response filters that optimize the wavefront correction: we
tested these algorithms through full numerical simulations of a
single-conjugate AO system comprising an adaptive secondary mirror with 1127
actuators and a pyramid wavefront sensor (WFS). The actual practicability of
the algorithms depends on both robustness and knowledge of the real system:
errors in the system model may even worsen the performance. In particular we
checked the robustness of the algorithms in different conditions, proving that
the proposed method can reject both disturbance and calibration errors
Ground-based adaptive optics coronagraphic performance under closed-loop predictive control
The discovery of the exoplanet Proxima b highlights the potential for the
coming generation of giant segmented mirror telescopes (GSMTs) to characterize
terrestrial --- potentially habitable --- planets orbiting nearby stars with
direct imaging. This will require continued development and implementation of
optimized adaptive optics systems feeding coronagraphs on the GSMTs. Such
development should proceed with an understanding of the fundamental limits
imposed by atmospheric turbulence. Here we seek to address this question with a
semi-analytic framework for calculating the post-coronagraph contrast in a
closed-loop AO system. We do this starting with the temporal power spectra of
the Fourier basis calculated assuming frozen flow turbulence, and then apply
closed-loop transfer functions. We include the benefits of a simple predictive
controller, which we show could provide over a factor of 1400 gain in raw PSF
contrast at 1 on bright stars, and more than a factor of 30 gain on
an I = 7.5 mag star such as Proxima. More sophisticated predictive control can
be expected to improve this even further. Assuming a photon noise limited
observing technique such as High Dispersion Coronagraphy, these gains in raw
contrast will decrease integration times by the same large factors. Predictive
control of atmospheric turbulence should therefore be seen as one of the key
technologies which will enable ground-based telescopes to characterize
terrrestrial planets.Comment: Accepted to JATI
CFD simulation using FLUENT and RANS3D - A validation exercise
The present work involves two-dimensional numerical simulation of three benchmark problems like (i) Laminar flow in a lid driven cavity (ii) Turbulent flow past a backward facing step and (iii) turbulent flow past NACA0012 aerofoil, using in-house flow solution code RANS3D and the commercially available FLUENT code. The results obtained using these codes are compared with the available measurement data and/or other computations
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