Seasonal variation in soil and plant water potentials in a Bolivian tropical moist and dry forest

We determined seasonal variation in soil matric potentials (¿soil) along a topographical gradient and with soil depth in a Bolivian tropical dry (1160 mm y-1 rain) and moist forest (1580 mm y-1). In each forest we analysed the effect of drought on predawn leaf water potentials (¿pd) and drought response (midday leaf water potential at a standardized ¿pd of -0.98 MPa; ¿md) of saplings of three tree species, varying in shade-tolerance and leaf phenology. ¿soil changed during the dry season and most extreme in the dry forest. Crests were drier than slopes and valleys. Dry-forest top soil was drier than deep soil in the dry season, the inverse was found in the wet season. In the moist forest the drought-deciduous species, Sweetia fruticosa, occupied dry sites. In the dry forest the short-lived pioneer, Solanum riparium, occupied wet sites and the shade-tolerant species, Acosmium cardenasii drier sites. Moist-forest species had similar drought response. The dry-forest pioneer showed a larger drought response than the other two species. Heterogeneity in soil water availability and interspecific differences in moisture requirements and drought response suggest great potential for niche differentiation. Species may coexist at different topographical locations, by extracting water from different soil layers and/or by doing so at different moments in tim

Drought tolerance of tropical tree species : functional traits, trade-offs and species distribution

KEY-WORDS: Bolivia, drought tolerance, shade tolerance, functional traits, trade-offs, ecophysiology, species distribution Tropical forests occur under rainfall regimes that vary greatly in the rainfall pattern and frequency and intensity of drought. Consequently water availability is one of the most important environmental factors influencing community structure, species composition, and plant functioning across large-scale rainfall gradients and small-scale topographic gradients within forests. The relative success of tree species to establish along these gradients of water availability and their success in dealing with future changes in water availability will depend on how they are adapted to tolerate drought. In this dissertation I applied a multi-species, multi-trait approach in field studies and a controlled experiment to give detailed information on the mechanisms of drought-tolerance of a large set of tropical dry and moist forest tree species. The following research questions were addressed; 1) How do dry and moist forests differ in soil water availability? 2) How are dry and moist forest species adapted to drought and what different drought-strategies can be distinguished? 3) Is there a trade-off between drought- and shade-tolerance? and 4) How do drought- and shade-tolerance determine local and regional tree species distribution? Dry season soil water availability is clearly lower in the dry forest than in the moist forest. Especially in the dry forest there is a lot of temporal and spatial variation in soil water availability. Temporal variation depends on the annual cycle of precipitation. Spatial heterogeneity is two-dimensional; 1) water availability varies with topography of the landscape; elevated crests are dry in comparison to slopes and low valleys, and 2) soil water is vertically redistributed with soil depth; in the dry season more water is available in deep soil layers while in the wet season most water is found in the top soil. When combining temporal and spatial dimensions, a complex mosaic of soil water availability emerges that shows great potential for niche partitioning among species at various levels, if species are adapted to exploit this variation. Seedlings of dry forest species have evolved mechanisms that enhance their access to water in deep soil layers, increase drought-induced cavitation resistance and increase water conservation. Seedlings of moist forest species show adaptations that improve their light foraging capacity and increase nutrient and water acquisition. Associations among functional traits show that there are three major drought strategies among tropical tree species, 1) physiological drought-tolerance, 2) drought-intolerance and 3) drought-avoidance. No conclusive evidence for a direct trade-off between species drought- and shade-tolerance was found, and the association between drought- and shade-tolerance is mainly subject to the scale of observation. On small scales, within the dry forest, drought- and shade-tolerance are positively related, as species hydraulic properties are integrally linked with niche differentiation for both light and water. This implies that in their distribution, light-demanding species will be restricted to habitats that combine high light and high moisture availability, while shade-tolerant species will be the better competitors in drier and shadier habitats. On larger scales a strong trade-off between above and belowground biomass allocation was found, which should in theory have resulted in a trade-off between drought- and shade-tolerance, but in practice it did not. Plants can compensate for a low root mass fraction by producing relatively cheap roots with a large specific root length and compensate for a low leaf mass fraction by making cheap leaves with a large specific leaf area. Drought- and shade-tolerance thus depend largely on different suites of morphological traits and can be uncoupled. Species distribution along the rainfall gradient was not directly explained by species drought survival, mainly because deciduousness was the most important factor contributing to survival and deciduous species are well represented in both dry and moist forests. The occurrence of evergreen species at the dry end of the rainfall gradient largely depends on drought related traits as a high wood density and a large biomass allocation to deep roots. Species occurrence at the moist end of the rainfall gradient was mainly determined by traits related to light-demand, as a high leaf mass fraction and long, branched root systems. In conclusion, I propose that at small scales, within forests, species distribution along water gradients depends on the interaction between species drought- and shade-tolerance while at larger scales distribution of (evergreen) species is mainly determined by their drought-tolerance. <br/

Two-phase flow analogy as an effective boundary condition for modelling liquids at atomistic resolution

A hybrid Molecular Dynamics/Fluctuating Hydrodynamics framework based on the analogy with two-phase hydrodynamics has been extended to dynamically tracking the feature of interest at all-atom resolution. In the model, the hydrodynamics description is used as an effective boundary condition to close the molecular dynamics solution without resorting to standard periodic boundary conditions. The approach is implemented in a popular Molecular Dynamics package GROMACS and results for two biomolecular systems are reported. A small peptide dialanine and a complete capsid of a virus porcine circovirus 2 in water are considered and shown to reproduce the structural and dynamic properties compared to those obtained in theory, purely atomistic simulations, and experiment

Broad Band Shock Associated Noise Modelling for High-Area-Ratio Under-Expanded Jets

Broadband Shock Associated Noise (BBSAN) is an important component of supersonic jet noise for jets at off-design conditions when the pressure at the nozzle exit is different from the ambient. Two high area ratio under-expanded supersonic jets at Nozzle Pressure Ratios (NPRs) 3.4 and 4.2 are considered. The jets correspond to conditions of the experiment in the Laboratory for Turbulence Research in Aerospace and Combustion (LTRAC) in the Supersonic Jet Facility of Monash University. Flow solutions are obtained by the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) methods. The solutions are validated against the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) data. For noise spectra predictions, the LES solution is combined with the time-domain Ffowcs Wiliams -Hawkings method. To probe accuracy of the reduced-order method based on acoustic analogy, the RANS solutions are substituted in the Morris and Miller BBSAN method, where different options for modelling of the acoustic correlation scales are investigated. The noise spectra predictions are compared with the experimental data from the non-anechoic LTRAC facility and the NASA empirical sJet model. Apart from the low-frequencies influenced by the jet mixing noise, the RANS-based acoustic predictions align with those from LES for most frequencies in the range of Strouhal numbers (St) 0.4<St<2 within 1-2 dB

A comparison of the value of viscosity for several water models using Poiseuille flow in a nano-channel

The viscosity-temperature relation is determined for the water models SPC/E, TIP4P, TIP4P/Ew, and TIP4P/2005 by considering Poiseuille flow inside a nano-channel using molecular dynamics. The viscosity is determined by fitting the resulting velocity profile (away from the walls) to the continuum solution for a Newtonian fluid and then compared to experimental values. The results show that the TIP4P/2005 model gives the best prediction of the viscosity for the complete range of temperatures for liquid water, and thus it is the preferred water model of these considered here for simulations where the magnitude of viscosity is crucial. On the other hand, with the TIP4P model, the viscosity is severely underpredicted, and overall the model performed worst, whereas the SPC/E and TIP4P/Ew models perform moderately

Effect of large-scale mixing on the axisymmetric structure of turbulence correlations in complex dual stream jets

Dual-stream flows are a ubiquitous feature of turbofan engines used in civil aviation. In this paper we analyze the spatial structure of turbulence correlations in a high speed round coaxial jet operating at heated conditions. In particular we consider the effect of axisymmetry of a second rank correlation tensor and the usual fourth order Reynolds stress auto-covariance tensor that enters the Goldstein’s generalized acoustic analogy formulation. The invariants of these tensors can be reduced to a simpler form depending on whether isotropy or axisymmetry was assumed. We show that an axisymmetric turbulence approximation remains accurate in the core region but tends to break down in the bypass stream and especially in the interfacial region between both streams where high level of mixing of turbulence takes place. In the paper we present some of our latest results and provide a road map for the future calculations that we have planned

Flow and Noise Predictions of Coaxial Jets using LES and RANS Methods

Flow and noise solutions of the two Large Eddy Simulation (LES) approaches are evaluated for the jet flow conditions corresponding to a benchmark co-axial jet case from the EU CoJeN (Computation of Coaxial Jet Noise) experiment. The jet is heated and issues for a short-cowl axi-symmetric nozzle with a central body at a transonic speed. The first LES method is based on the Compact Accurately Boundary-Adjusting high-REsolution Technique (CABARET) scheme, for which implementation features include asynchronous time stepping at an optimal Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) number, a wall model, and a synthetic turbulence inflow boundary condition. The CABARET LES is implemented on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The second LES approach is based on the hybrid Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)/ Implicit LES method that uses a mixture of high-order Roe and WENO scheme and a wall distance model of the Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (IDDES) type. The RANS/ILES method is run on an MPI cluster. Two grid generation approaches are considered: the unstructured grid using OpenFOAM utility “snappyHexMesh” (sHM) and the conventional structured multiblock body-fitted curvilinear grid. The LES flow solutions are compared with the experiment and also with solutions obtained from the standard axi-symmetric RANS method using the k- turbulence model. For noise predictions, The LES solutions are coupled with the penetrable surface formation of the Ffowcs Williams –Hawkings method. The results of noise predictions are compared with the experiment and the effect of different LES grids and acoustic integration surfaces is discussed