Achievement

Jason Graham is currently finishing a paper on multi-scale modeling of turbulent canopy flows, to be submitted to the journal Physics of Fluids. Jason's work has been focused on Large Eddy Simulation (LES) models of turbulent flow. In particular, he has adopted an updated fractional step pressure correction scheme for the LES code, in order to correct mass conservation issues observed when the immersed boundary method was implemented. The immersed boundary method is used to represent solid objects in the flow field and is used for Renormalized Numerical Simulation (RNS). The RNS framework has been applied to the flow over fractal tree canopies and provides a means for accounting for the multiscale geometry using a downscaling approach. Hydrodynamic forces from the large scale branches of the canopy are measured directly from the flow field, then are renormalized to obtain the forces due to the small scale branches, which are not resolved by the computational mesh.