Numerical Simulation of 3D Wind Flow in Suburban Environment with Topographical Effects

3D wind field construction is important in many aspects, such as wind energy assessment, wind turbine siting and weather forecasting. The development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) 3D wind flow over complex terrain and boundary conditions in simulation has been studied intensively over past thirty years. However, the topographical effects has seldom been considered in the 3-D wind field construction in suburban environment. In this thesis, 3-D wind field is constructed with consideration of terrain effects. 3-D terrain flowing mesh is built from digital elevation data (DEM) by in house codes. The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved by the standard k-ϵ turbulence model with software Ansys Fluent ©. The integration between the topographical effects and 3D wind field in suburban environment is investigated. Simulation results of the 3-D wind field, wind velocity distributions, turbulence intensity distributions, wind power density distributions, and wind profiles were obtained from Purdue University Calumet (PUC) campus. Additionally, the surround building effect and topographical effect are discussed. The simulation results are validated against measurements data