Study on Actuator Line Modeling of Two NREL 5-MW Wind Turbine Wakes

The wind turbine wakes impact the efficiency and lifespan of the wind farm. Therefore, to improve the wind plant performance, research on wind plant control is essential. The actuator line model (ALM) is proposed to simulate the wind turbine efficiently. This research investigates the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 5 Million Watts (NREL 5-MW) wind turbine wakes with Open Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM) using ALM. Firstly, a single NREL 5-MW turbine is simulated. The comparison of the power and thrust with Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence (FAST) shows a good agreement below the rated wind speed. The information relating to wind turbine wakes is given in detail. The top working status is proved at the wind speed of 8 m/s and the downstream distance of more than 5 rotor diameters (5D). Secondly, another case with two NREL 5-MW wind turbines aligned is also carried out, in which 7D is validated as the optimum distance between the two turbines. The result also shows that the upstream wind turbine has an obvious influence on the downstream one

Study on SPH Viscosity Term Formulations

For viscosity-dominated flows, the viscous effect plays a much more important role. Since the viscosity term in SPH-governing (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) equations involves the discretization of a second-order derivative, its treatment could be much more challenging than that of a first-order derivative, such as the pressure gradient. The present paper summarizes a series of improved methods for modeling the second-order viscosity force term. By using a benchmark patch test, the numerical accuracy and efficiency of different approaches are evaluated under both uniform and non-uniform particle configurations. Then these viscosity force models are used to compute a documented lid-driven cavity flow and its interaction with a cylinder, from which the most recommended viscosity term formulation has been identified

Influences of magnetic coupling process on the spectrum of a disk covered by the corona

Recently, much attention has been paid to the magnetic coupling (MC) process, which is supported by very high emissivity indexes observed in Seyfert 1 galaxy MCG-6-30-15 and GBHC XTE J1650-500. But the rotational energy transferred from a black hole is simply assumed to be radiated away from the surrounding accretion disk in black-body spectrum, which is obviously not consistent with the observed hard power-law X-ray spectra. We intend to introduce corona into the MC model to make it more compatible with the observations. We describe the model and the procedure of a simplified Monte Carlo simulation, compare the output spectra in the cases with and without the MC effects, and discuss the influences of three parameters involved in the MC process on the output spectra. It is shown that the MC process augments radiation fluxes in the UV or X-ray band. The emergent spectrum is affected by the BH spin and magnetic field strength at the BH horizon, while it is almost unaffected by the radial profile of the magnetic field at the disk. Introducing corona into the MC model will improve the fitting of the output spectra from AGNs and GBHCs.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, accepted by A&

Constrained structure of ancient Chinese poetry facilitates speech content grouping

Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage [1, 2]; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements [3]. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic [4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and statistical cues [5, 9] are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language

A hybrid stabilization technique for simulating water wave - Structure interaction by incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) method

The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is emerging as a potential tool for studying water wave related problems, especially for violent free surface flow and large deformation problems. The incompressible SPH (ISPH) computations have been found not to be able to maintain the stability in certain situations and there exist some spurious oscillations in the pressure time history, which is similar to the weakly compressible SPH (WCSPH). One main cause of this problem is related to the non-uniform and clustered distribution of the moving particles. In order to improve the model performance, the paper proposed an efficient hybrid numerical technique aiming to correct the ill particle distributions. The correction approach is realized through the combination of particle shifting and pressure gradient improvement. The advantages of the proposed hybrid technique in improving ISPH calculations are demonstrated through several applications that include solitary wave impact on a slope or overtopping a seawall, and regular wave slamming on the subface of open-piled structure

Broadband RCS Reduction of Microstrip Patch Antenna Using Bandstop Frequency Selective Surface

In this article, a simple and effective approach is presented to reduce the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of microstrip patch antenna in ultra broad frequency band. This approach substitutes a metallic ground plane of a conventional patch antenna with a hybrid ground consisting of bandstop Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) cells with partial metallic plane. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach, the influence of different ground planes on antenna’s performance is investigated. Thus, a patch antenna with miniaturized FSS cells is proposed. The results suggest that this antenna shows 3dB RCS reduction almost in the whole out-of operating band within 1-20GHz for wide incident angles when compared to conventional antenna, while its radiation characteristics are sustained simultaneously. The reasonable agreement between the measured and the simulated results verifies the efficiency of the proposed approach. Moreover, this approach doesn’t alter the lightweight, low-profile, easy conformal and easy manufacturing nature of the original antenna and can be extended to obtain low-RCS antennas with metallic planes in broadband that are quite suitable for the applications which are sensitive to the variation of frequencies