Related papers: Role of Crown in Tree Resistance Against High Wind…
Trees are key roughness elements in urban environments, shaping airflow, microclimates, and pollutant dispersion. Yet the aerodynamic drag of complex tree-like structures at high Reynolds numbers remains poorly characterized compared with…
A tentative scaling theory is presented of a tree swaying in a turbulent wind. It is argued that the turbulence of the air within the crown is in the inertial regime. An eddy causes a dynamic bending response of the branches according to a…
Flexible plants, fungi, and sessile animals are thought to reconfigure in the wind and water to reduce the drag forces that act upon them. In strong winds, for example, leaves roll up into cone shapes that reduce flutter and drag when…
Whereas most plants are flexible structures that undergo large deformations under flow, another process can occur when the plant is broken by heavy fluid-loading. We investigate here the mechanism of such possible breakage, focusing on the…
Flexible broad leaves are thought to reconfigure in the wind and water to reduce the drag forces that act upon them. Simple mathematical models of a flexible beam immersed in a two-dimensional flow will also exhibit this behavior. What is…
The effects of trees on urban flows are often determined using computational fluid dynamics approaches which typically use a quadratic drag formulation based on the leaf-area density $a$ and a volumetric drag coefficient $C_{d}^V$ to model…
Automation of cranes can have a direct impact on the productivity of construction projects. In this paper, we focus on the control of one of the most used cranes, the boom crane. Tower cranes and overhead cranes have been widely studied in…
Most plants and benthic organisms have evolved efficient reconfiguration mechanisms to resist flow-induced loads. These mechanisms can be divided into bending, in which plants reduce their sail area through elastic deformation, and pruning,…
The flow speed-up generated by windbreaks can be used to increase the power production of wind turbines. However, due to the increased drag imposed by the windbreaks, their use in large wind turbine arrays has been questioned. We use large…
Airborne wind energy systems aim to generate renewable energy by means of the aerodynamic lift produced by a wing tethered to the ground and controlled to fly crosswind paths. The problem of maximizing the average power developed by the…
Power loss mechanisms in large wind farms are complex due to the multiscale nature of wind farm aerodynamics. Recent studies based on the two-scale momentum theory have brought new insights into this field; however, most of them have been…
A novel set of wind tunnel measurements of the drag force and its spatial distribution along aligned arrays of cubes of height H and planar area index lambdap (air gap between cubes) equal to 0.028 (5H) to 0.69 (0.2H) is presented and…
The role of forest heterogeneity in the long-term, large-scale dynamics of forest fires is investigated by means of a cellular automata model and mean field approximation. Heterogeneity was conceived as trees (or acres of forest) with…
Urban trees play a crucial role in urban climate in many aspects. However, existing research has not adequately explored the impact from a time-evolving perspective, that is, tree growth over time. To bridge this research gap, this study…
An approach to control tethered wings for airborne wind energy is proposed. A fixed length of the lines is considered, and the aim of the control system is to obtain figure-eight crosswind trajectories. The proposed technique is based on…
This is a numerical study of wind pressure loads on low rise buildings in which three different types of roofs were analyzed which are the flat, gable and circular roof at different wind speed. The numerical analysis was performed using…
The potential of tree planting as a natural climate solution is often undermined by inadequate monitoring of tree planting projects. Current monitoring methods involve measuring trees by hand for each species, requiring extensive cost,…
Plants have developed different tropisms: in particular, they re-orient the growth of their branches towards light (phototropism) or upwards (gravitropism). How these tropisms affect the shape of a tree crown remains unanswered. We address…
We use our semi-analytic solution of the nonlinear force-free field equation to construct three-dimensional magnetic fields that are applicable to the solar corona and study their statistical properties for estimating the degree of braiding…
Remote monitoring of drones has become a global objective due to emerging applications in national security and managing aerial delivery traffic. Despite their relatively small size, drones can carry significant payloads, which require…