scholarly journals The fence experiment – full-scale lidar-based shelter observations

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfredo Peña ◽  
Andreas Bechmann ◽  
Davide Conti ◽  
Nikolas Angelou

Abstract. We present shelter measurements of a fence from a field experiment in Denmark. The measurements were performed with three lidars scanning on a vertical plane downwind of the fence. Inflow conditions are based on sonic anemometer observations of a nearby mast. For fence-undisturbed conditions, the lidars' measurements agree well with those from the sonic anemometers and, at the mast position, the average inflow conditions are well described by the logarithmic profile. Seven cases are defined based on the relative wind direction to the fence, the fence porosity, and the inflow conditions. The larger the relative direction, the lower the effect of the shelter. For the case with the largest relative directions, no sheltering effect is observed in the far wake (distances ⪆ 6 fence heights downwind of the fence). When comparing a near-neutral to a stable case, a stronger shelter effect is noticed. The shelter is highest below  ≈ 1.46 fence heights and can sometimes be observed at all downwind positions (up to 11 fence heights downwind). Below the fence height, the porous fence has a lower impact on the flow close to the fence compared to the solid fence. Velocity profiles in the far wake converge onto each other using the self-preserving forms from two-dimensional wake analysis.

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfredo Peña ◽  
Andreas Bechmann ◽  
Davide Conti ◽  
Nikolas Angelou

Abstract. We present shelter measurements of a fence from a field experiment in Denmark. The measurements were performed with three lidars scanning on a vertical plane downwind of the fence. Inflow conditions are based on sonic observations of a nearby mast. For fence-undisturbed conditions, the lidars' measurements agree well with those from the sonics and, at the mast position, the average inflow conditions are well described by the logarithmic profile. Seven cases are defined based on the relative wind direction to the fence, the fence porosity, and the inflow conditions. The larger the relative direction, the lower is the shelter. For the case with the largest relative directions, no shelter is observed in the far wake (distances ⪆ 6 fence heights downwind of the fence). When comparing a near-neutral to a stable case, a stronger shelter effect is noticed. The shelter is highest below ≈ 1.46 fence heights and can sometimes be observed at all downwind positions (up to 11 fence heights). Below the fence height, the porous fence has a lower impact on the flow close to the fence compared to the solid fence. Velocity profiles in the far wake converge onto each other using the self-preserving forms from two-dimensional wake analysis.


2012 ◽  
Vol 501 ◽  
pp. 413-417
Author(s):  
Zhen Ya Duan ◽  
Ying Ying Dong ◽  
Fu Lin Zheng ◽  
Jun Mei Zhang

In this paper, the domestic and foreign research progress of numerical simulation on the porous fence is introduced briefly, and a numerical model is established to simulate the flow characteristics behind the butterfly porous fence through the FLUENT software. The comparison results found good agreement between the numerical model and wind tunnel experimental data with an error of 7.8% in the wind reduction ratio, indicating the present numerical model can be used to undertake study on butterfly and non-planar porous fences. The effect of porosity on the flow characteristics behind the butterfly porous fence have been evaluated using the present model to determine an optimum porosity for sheltering effect of an isolated porous fence. As a result, the butterfly porous fences with a range of porosity from 0.27 to 0.32 seem to have a better shelter effect among the studied porosities, and all the wind reduction ratios approach to 60%.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (8) ◽  
pp. 1803-1819 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luksa Luznik ◽  
Cody J. Brownell ◽  
Murray R. Snyder ◽  
Hyung Suk Kang

Abstract This paper describes a set of turbulence measurements at sea in the area of high flow distortion in the near-wake and recirculation zone behind a ship's superstructure that is similar in geometry to a helicopter hangar/flight deck arrangement found on many modern U.S. Navy ships. The instrumented ship is a 32-m-long training vessel operated by the United States Naval Academy that has been modified by adding a representative flight deck and hangar structure. The flight deck is instrumented with up to seven sonic anemometers/thermometers that are used to obtain simultaneous velocity measurements at various spatial locations on the flight deck, and one sonic anemometer at bow mast is used to characterize inflow atmospheric boundary conditions. Data characterizing wind over the deck at an incoming angle of 0° (head winds) and wind speeds from 2 to 10 m s−1 obtained in the Chesapeake Bay are presented and discussed. Turbulent statistics of inflow conditions are analyzed using the Kaimal universal turbulence spectral model for the atmospheric surface layer and show that for the present dataset this approach eliminates the need to account for platform motion in computing variances and covariances. Conditional sampling of mean flow and turbulence statistics at the flight deck indicate no statistically significant variations between unstable, stable, and neutral atmospheric inflow conditions, and the results agree with the published data for flows over the backward-facing step geometries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 1183-1191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross T. Palomaki ◽  
Nathan T. Rose ◽  
Michael van den Bossche ◽  
Thomas J. Sherman ◽  
Stephan F. J. De Wekker

AbstractUnmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly used to study atmospheric structure and dynamics. While much emphasis has been on the development of fixed-wing unmanned aircraft for atmospheric investigations, the use of multirotor aircraft is relatively unexplored, especially for capturing atmospheric winds. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the efficacy of estimating wind speed and direction with 1) a direct approach using a sonic anemometer mounted on top of a hexacopter and 2) an indirect approach using attitude data from a quadcopter. The data are collected by the multirotor aircraft hovering 10 m above ground adjacent to one or more sonic anemometers. Wind speed and direction show good agreement with sonic anemometer measurements in the initial experiments. Typical errors in wind speed and direction are smaller than 0.5 and 30°, respectively. Multirotor aircraft provide a promising alternative to traditional platforms for vertical profiling in the atmospheric boundary layer, especially in conditions where a tethered balloon system is typically deployed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aditya Choukulkar ◽  
W. Alan Brewer ◽  
Scott P. Sandberg ◽  
Ann Weickmann ◽  
Timothy A. Bonin ◽  
...  

Abstract. Accurate three-dimensional information of wind flow fields can be an important tool in not only visualizing complex flow but also understanding the underlying physical processes and improving flow modeling. However, a thorough analysis of the measurement uncertainties is required to properly interpret results. The XPIA (eXperimental Planetary boundary layer Instrumentation Assessment) field campaign conducted at the Boulder Atmospheric Observatory (BAO) in Erie, CO, from 2 March to 31 May 2015 brought together a large suite of in situ and remote sensing measurement platforms to evaluate complex flow measurement strategies. In this paper, measurement uncertainties for different single and multi-Doppler strategies using simple scan geometries (conical, vertical plane and staring) are investigated. The tradeoffs (such as time–space resolution vs. spatial coverage) among the different measurement techniques are evaluated using co-located measurements made near the BAO tower. Sensitivity of the single-/multi-Doppler measurement uncertainties to averaging period are investigated using the sonic anemometers installed on the BAO tower as the standard reference. Finally, the radiometer measurements are used to partition the measurement periods as a function of atmospheric stability to determine their effect on measurement uncertainty. It was found that with an increase in spatial coverage and measurement complexity, the uncertainty in the wind measurement also increased. For multi-Doppler techniques, the increase in uncertainty for temporally uncoordinated measurements is possibly due to requiring additional assumptions of stationarity along with horizontal homogeneity and less representative line-of-sight velocity statistics. It was also found that wind speed measurement uncertainty was lower during stable conditions compared to unstable conditions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 356-360 ◽  
pp. 1391-1395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhen Ya Duan ◽  
Wen Xiang Yang ◽  
Tian Shun Wang ◽  
Jun Mei Zhang

The flow field behind non-planar porous fence of geometric porosity ε=0.273 with various bottom gaps (G) has been investigated by hot-wire anemometer velocity field measurement technique in a wind tunnel experiment. Seven gap ratios G/H=0.000, 0.025, 0.075, 0.125, 0.150, 0.175, 0.200 of non-planar porous fence were tested in this study with the free-stream velocity fixed at 10m/s. The experimental data were analyzed and the turbulence intensity and wind reduction ratios for different gaps of the porous fence were calculated to estimate the shelter effect of a non-planar porous fence model. The results show that the gap ratio G/H=0.150 gives the best shelter effect among the seven gaps of the non-planar porous fence tested in this study, having a better mean velocity and turbulence intensity as well as wind reduction ratio in a large area behind the non-planar porous fence.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Li ◽  
W. Babel ◽  
K. Tanaka ◽  
T. Foken

Abstract. For non-omnidirectional sonic anemometers like the Kaijo-Denki DAT 600 TR61A probe, it is shown that separate planar-fit rotations must be used for the undisturbed (open part of the sonic anemometer) and the disturbed sector. This increases the friction velocity while no effect on the scalar fluxes was found. In the disturbed sector, irregular values of − u′w′ < 0 were detected for low wind velocities. Up to a certain extent these results can be transferred to the CSAT3 sonic anemometer (Campbell Scientific Ltd). This study was done for data sets from the Naqu-BJ site on the Tibetan Plateau.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Mauder ◽  
Matthias J. Zeeman

Abstract. Three-dimensional sonic anemometers are the core component of eddy covariance systems, which are widely used for micrometeorological and ecological research. In order to characterize the measurement uncertainty of these instruments we present and analyse the results from a field intercomparison experiment of six commonly used sonic anemometer models from four major manufacturers. These models include Campbell CSAT3, Gill HS-50 and R3, METEK uSonic-3 Omni, R. M. Young 81000 and 81000RE. The experiment was conducted over a meadow at the TERENO/ICOS site DE-Fen in southern Germany over a period of 16 days in June of 2016 as part of the ScaleX campaign. The measurement height was 3 m for all sensors, which were separated by 9 m from each other, each on its own tripod, in order to limit contamination of the turbulence measurements by adjacent structures as much as possible. Moreover, the high-frequency data from all instruments were treated with the same post-processing algorithm. In this study, we compare the results for various turbulence statistics, which include mean horizontal wind speed, standard deviations of vertical wind velocity and sonic temperature, friction velocity, and the buoyancy flux. Quantitative measures of uncertainty, such as bias and comparability, are derived from these results. We find that biases are generally very small for all sensors and all computed variables, except for the sonic temperature measurements of the two Gill sonic anemometers (HS and R3), confirming a known transducer-temperature dependence of the sonic temperature measurement. The best overall agreement between the different instruments was found for the mean wind speed and the buoyancy flux.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 5933-5953 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Frank ◽  
William J. Massman ◽  
Brent E. Ewers

Abstract. Sonic anemometers are the principal instruments in micrometeorological studies of turbulence and ecosystem fluxes. Common designs underestimate vertical wind measurements because they lack a correction for transducer shadowing, with no consensus on a suitable correction. We reanalyze a subset of data collected during field experiments in 2011 and 2013 featuring two or four CSAT3 sonic anemometers. We introduce a Bayesian analysis to resolve the three-dimensional correction by optimizing differences between anemometers mounted both vertically and horizontally. A grid of 512 points (∼ ±5° resolution in wind location) is defined on a sphere around the sonic anemometer, from which the shadow correction for each transducer pair is derived from a set of 138 unique state variables describing the quadrants and borders. Using the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, the Bayesian model proposes new values for each state variable, recalculates the fast-response data set, summarizes the 5 min wind statistics, and accepts the proposed new values based on the probability that they make measurements from vertical and horizontal anemometers more equivalent. MCMC chains were constructed for three different prior distributions describing the state variables: no shadow correction, the Kaimal correction for transducer shadowing, and double the Kaimal correction, all initialized with 10 % uncertainty. The final posterior correction did not depend on the prior distribution and revealed both self- and cross-shadowing effects from all transducers. After correction, the vertical wind velocity and sensible heat flux increased  ∼ 10 % with  ∼ 2 % uncertainty, which was significantly higher than the Kaimal correction. We applied the posterior correction to eddy-covariance data from various sites across North America and found that the turbulent components of the energy balance (sensible plus latent heat flux) increased on average between 8 and 12 %, with an average 95 % credible interval between 6 and 14 %. Considering this is the most common sonic anemometer in the AmeriFlux network and is found widely within FLUXNET, these results provide a mechanistic explanation for much of the energy imbalance at these sites where all terrestrial/atmospheric fluxes of mass and energy are likely underestimated.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebba Dellwik ◽  
Poul Hummelshøj ◽  
Gerhard Peters

&lt;p&gt;Sonic anemometers provide point observations of the three-dimensional velocity field at high sampling rates and are crucial instruments for understanding and quantifying the fluxes of momentum, energy and scalars between the atmosphere and Earth&amp;#8217;s surface. Since the beginning of sonic anemometry 50 years ago, the characterization of flow distortion, i.e. how the instrument structure alters the flow, has been an ongoing research topic. Multi-path sonic anemometry provides a new opportunity to research and understand flow distortion on the vertical velocity component, since several positions in the small measurement volume can be measured simultaneously. In this work, we use data from a flat terrain measurement campaign in 2020, in which several sonic anemometers were mounted on 4m towers placed 4m apart. The analysis is focused on the Multipath Class-A sonic anemometer (Metek GmbH, Germany), which provides vertical velocity observations from three vertical paths 120 degrees and 0.1m apart. Vertical velocities are also calculated from several combinations of the tilted paths. We investigate how the vertical velocity component is altered depending on wind direction relative to different parts of the instrument structure. We demonstrate that by an optimal combination of the different paths, the vertical velocity variance and fluxes can be significantly enhanced. We also show spectra, and especially look at the high frequency end of the spectrum, where the relative behaviour of the velocity components is known from fundamental turbulence theory. Further, the relative importance of transducer shadowing and pressure-induced blockage effects is discussed.&lt;/p&gt;


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