Date of Award
2010
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Engineering Science
Program
Mechanical and Materials Engineering
Supervisor
Dr. Eric Savory
Abstract
Large eddy simulations have been used to compare the near surface outflow of the commonly used transient impinging jet to that of the physically realistic cooling source downburst model. This has shown that the transient impinging jet is incapable of capturing the buoyancy driven features of an actual downburst, due to its non-physical forcing parameters. The non-dimensional vorticity term for the impinging jet, representative of the relative contribution of the ring vortex to the near surface outflow, differs by at least 56% to that for the cooling source model. The cooling source model has also been used to compare the outflow of a downburst line, where multiple downbursts occur simultaneously, to that of an isolated event. This has shown that speed-up factors of up to 1.55 can be expected and that total damaging surface area can increase by up to 82% for a two event downburst line.
Recommended Citation
Vermeire, Brian Cameron, "Numerical Modeling of Thunderstorm Downbursts and Downburst Lines" (2010). Digitized Theses. 4333.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4333