Atmospheric Boundary Layer - Neutral

This case is a large-eddy simulation of a neutral atmospheric boundary layer. The case uses periodic boundary conditions on the sides (east, west, north, south), a wall-model in the bottom wall and a stress free boundary condition at the top of the domain. A proportional controller is used to drive the velocity at a given height. The controller adjusts the forcing at each time-step to match a given planar average velocity at a given height. More information about the controller can be found in ABL Forcing Source Terms. It takes about 10,000 [s] for the the turbulence to develop. The example runs for 20,000 [s].

Step by step instructions to run the case

  1. Load the appropriate Nalu environment. This requires loading the libraries and Python environment as described in Setting up the environment. For users on Peregrine the function defined in Initial Setup should suffice:

    nalu_env
    
  2. Go to the directory where the case is:

    cd nalu-wind/examples/abl_neutral/
    
  3. Modify the setup.yaml file to include all the necessary simulation parameters.

  4. Run the executable and provide the setup.yaml file as input:

    ../nalu_input_fileX -s setup.yaml
    

    For users on Peregrine, now copy the executables to the case directory:

    cp /projects/windsim/nalu-wind-executables/* .
    
  5. Generate the mesh:

    ./abl_mesh -i abl_preprocess.yaml
    
  6. Generate the initial condition:

    ./nalu_preprocess -i abl_preprocess.yaml
    
  7. Run the nalu executable:

    mpirun -np 600 naluX -i abl_simulation.yaml
    

    In this example 600 processors are used, but any number of processors could be used. Target 50K elements per core for choosing number of MPI cores.

Post-processing

Nalu’s output is generated at runtime. The abl_plots.py Python script is used to plot simulation results. The script will load the plane-averaged statistics and plot them as function of time and height. To run the script, load the Python environment if needed, and run the Python script:

python abl_plots.py