Research

• Computational Investigation and Optimization of Wind Turbine Farm Layouts using Spectral Element Methods (with PhD student Murphy O'Dea):

Large-scale wind turbine installations are sited using layouts based on site topology, real estate costs and restrictions, and turbine power output. Existing optimization programs have limited capabilities to site multiple turbines and are based on simple geometric turbine wake models, which typically overestimate individual turbine output. Yet, complete CFD modeling of entire wind turbine fields requires enormous computational resources. This has led to the development of hybrid turbine blade modeling techniques which are combined with CFD field computations. The most promising of such methods is the actuator line model whereby each turbine blade is modeled as a geometric line, rotating in space, and the forces due to the blades are applied at discrete grid points in space and time. In this project, we are developing an improved actuator line model, which is combined with the advanced parallel Spectral Element Method (SEM) open-source CFD code NEK5000, to model the wake flows of large wind turbines. For this research we are using the COMET parallel supercomputer provided by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562.

Murphy O’Dea and Laila Guessous, “Development of an advanced wind turbine actuator line model,” Paper # FEDSM2018-83173, ASME 2018 5th Joint US-European Fluids Engineering Summer Conference, Montreal, QC, Canada, July 2018

Murphy O’Dea and Laila Guessous, “Further Developments in Numerical Simulations of Wind Turbine Flows Using the Actuator Line Method,” Paper # FEDSM2016-7863, ASME 2016 Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting, Washington, DC, July 2016

• Numerical Simulation of Oil Jet Impingement Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow: (with Prof. Brian Sangeorzan, Dr. Alex Alkidas; Students: Yen Chung Liu, Morgan Jones, Aaron Demers, Sean Cassady, Kathleen Dupre)

Long used on heavy duty and high performance engines, oil jets are increasingly being used to cool the undersides of pistons in passenger vehicle engines due to the increased thermal loads on such engines. The effectiveness of such cooling depends on many parameters, including the oil jet flow rate, the oil fluid properties and the distance between the nozzle and the surface. In particular, knowing the jet impingement area is important for heat transfer calculations, yet few studies have focused on upward liquid or oil-jet flows. This ongoing study aims to improve our understanding of the fundamental flow and heat transfer characteristics of upward oil jets using a combination of experiments (Sangeorzan, Alkidas and Liu) and computational fluid dynamics simulations.

Bolong Ma, Morgan Jones, Aaron Demers, Laila Guessous and Brian Sangeorzan, “Numerical simulation of upward facing oil-jet cooling of a flat plate,” Paper # TFEC-IWHT2017-17517, 2nd Thermal and Fluid Engineering Summer Conference, Las Vegas, NV, April 2017

Yen-Chung Liu, Laila Guessous, Brian P. Sangeorzan, and Alexandros Costas Alkidas, “Laboratory Experiments on Oil-Jet Cooling of IC Engine Pistons: An Area-Average Correlation of Oil-Jet Impingement Heat Transfer,” ASCE Journal of Energy Engineering, DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)EY.1943-7897.0000227

J. Easter, C. Jarrett, C, Pespisa, Yen Chung Liu, A.C. Alkidas, L. Guessous, and B. P. Sangeorzan, “An Area-Average Correlation for Oil-Jet Cooling of Automotive Pistons,” Journal of Heat Transfer, 136, 124501 (2014); doi:10.1115/1.4027835

• Approximating Convective Boundary Conditions for Transient Thermal Simulations with Surrogate Models for Thermal Packaging Studies (with M.S. Student Jonathon Juszkiewycz)

The need for transient thermal simulations for vehicle packaging studies has grown rapidly in recent years. To date the computational costs associated with the transient simulation of 3D conjugate heat transfer phenomena has prohibited the widespread use of full vehicle transient simulations. Conjugate Heat Transfer simulations require solving for fluid velocities and temperatures, as well as solid temperatures simultaneously. This can be very costly for problems involving long transient drive cycles. In this study, we seek to circumvent the computational costs associated with long transient conjugate heat transfer simulations by combining transient thermal structural simulations with surrogate models that predict the local heat transfer coefficient and the local near wall fluid temperature. These surrogate models are developed using steady conjugate heat transfer simulations combined with several interpolation schemes. This is done by first segregates the thermal structural and fluid physics domains to take advantage of time scale differences. The two domains are then recoupled to calculate a series of steady state conjugate heat transfer simulations at various vehicle speeds. The local convection terms are then used to construct a set of surrogate models that have an independent variable of vehicle speed and that predict . The surrogate models are then coupled to the thermal structural simulation to simulate the wall temperature history.

Jonathon Juszkiewycz and Laila Guessous, "Approximating Convective Boundary Conditions for Transient Thermal Simulations with Surrogate Models for Thermal Packaging Studies," Paper 2019-01-0904, 2019 SAE Congress, Detroit, MI