Abstract
There is a complex coupling relationship between the airflow and snow cover. In a period of hours or even days, the airflow will cause the redistribution of snow, and the redistribution of snow will cause the airflow to change. This study develops a dynamic mesh technology applied in snow drifting simulation through a real-time dynamic mesh update to depict the snow surface evolution process under long-period snow drifting, and a solver application named driftScalarDyFoam based on OpenFOAM is implemented. This solver divides the long-period snow drifting process into several stages, in each of which a snow transport equation is applied to predict the spatial distribution of snow, and finally, the snow surface evolves according to the erosion–deposition model. This method that we have proposed has been validated for several measured cases, including snow distribution on a flat roof and snow distribution around a building.
Highlights
Aeolian transport, which is typified by snow drifting, manifests as the interaction between wind and a large number of tiny snow particles
This study mainly introduces the solver driftScalarDyFoam developed based on OpenFOAM, which refers to the classic snow transport model and erosion/deposition formula, and incorporates the multistage model to achieve simulations with long-term duration or complex meteorological conditions
Through the prediction of snow distribution on flat roofs and around buildings, driftScalarDyFoam has been shown to be robust and reliable in its results, which depicts its versatility in the research and production of snow engineering
Summary
Aeolian transport, which is typified by snow drifting, manifests as the interaction between wind and a large number of tiny snow particles. Tominaga et al (2011a) developed a system for predicting snow distribution combining a mesoscale meteorological model and a CFD model, in which weather conditions are updated in each time step. Related methods have been expanded in Zhu et al (2017) and Wang et al (2019): the former aims to introduce the RBF-based dynamic mesh method into the roof snow distribution, and the latter uses the immersion boundary method to obtain a more robust simulation process. OpenFOAM (or Open-source Field Operation And Manipulation) (Weller et al, 1998) is an open-source suite of libraries and applications designed to solve computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems, by which we modularize the airflow, snow transport, and the evolution of snow distribution (dynamic mesh), and the solver developed by these modules is named driftScalarDyFoam. Powered by native OpenFOAM tools, driftScalarDyFoam supports complex three-dimensional geometries, automated time step processing/snow evolution, and rich programmable interface, which will have a positive impact on the improvement of related methods and industrial production for snow engineering
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