Numerical Study of the Flow Characteristics of Downburst-like Wind over the 3D Hill Using Different Turbulence Models

Abstract

With the rapid development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology, it has been widely used to study the wind field characteristics of downbursts in mountainous areas. However, there is little guidance on the selection of different turbulence models for simulating downburst wind fields over hills using CFD, and few comparative studies have been conducted. This paper used nine turbulence models to simulate the wind field of a downburst over a 3D quadratic ideal hill. The simulated values of average and transient winds were compared with wind tunnel test data, and the flow characteristics at different moments under a downburst were analyzed. The flow characteristics in the wake region of the downburst over the hill are also quantitatively analyzed using the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method. The results show that approximately 85% of the results from the LES and REA models fall within a 30% error range, so the large eddy simulation (LES) model and the realizable k-ε model (REA) are more accurate in simulating the mean wind field, and the transient wind field simulated by the LES model is also in good agreement with the experimental data. In addition, this paper reveals the evolution mechanism of the transient wind field structure over a hill model under a downburst and finds that the first-order mode obtained by POD may be related to the acceleration effect on the hilltop.

Keywords

• downburst
• mountain wind field
• CFD simulation
• different turbulence models
• flow mechanism