UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Plume Rise And
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Plume Rise and Dispersion of Emissions from Low Level Buoyant Sources in Urban Areas A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering by Sam Pournazeri June 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marko Princevac, Chairperson Dr. Akula Venkatram Dr. Guillermo Aguilar Copyright by Sam Pournazeri 2012 The Dissertation of Sam Pournazeri is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to acknowledge my advisor Professor Marko Princevac. Without his help, this journey would have become impassable. His endless supports and encouragements throughout the course of this study are appreciable. His generosity, easy- going personality, and strong management skills make him not only perfect as an adviser, but someone who can act as a role-model for the future life. The way he looks at the life is fantastic. I truly believe that this dissertation would not have been possible without his help and support. I would like to thank my co-advisor, Professor Akula Venkatram for his perpetual helps and supports and for serving on my committee. His infinite knowledge in the field of air quality modeling is valuable and I truly believe without his comments, and extraordinary ideas, this dissertation could not reach to the desired quality. I would like to thank Prof. Venkatram, for always having an open door to questions that led to significant improvements of the dissertation. I owe my intense interest to this field to him. I would like to thank Professor Guillermo Aguilar for serving on my committee and being my teaching assistant advisor for spring 2009. I am thankful to him for his help and support throughout my PhD study. I would also like to thank Prof. Chris Dames who expand my knowledge in the field of thermal fluid science. Although Prof. Dames did not directly impact my research at UC Riverside, however, his distinct way of approaching iv the research problems, and transferring the knowledge to the audience was a great lesson to me. During the past four year, many other people were helping and supporting me throughout the development of this dissertation: Mr. Christian Bartolome, who helped and supported me throughout every seconds of this study without any expectations; Dr. Hansheng Pan, who taught me how to do the laboratory experimentations, her patience and kindness in teaching is valuable; Dr. Qiguo Jing, who helped me a lot throughout the plume rise field study and AERMOD simulations; Mr. Trevor Maynard, who provided a lot of support for the revision of my journal articles, his comments significantly improved these articles. I would also like to thank Mr. Karim Alizad, Ms. Si Tan, Mr. Nico Schulte, Mr. Senyeung Shu, and Mr. Eric Gutierrez for their help in the field and laboratory studies. Special thanks go to the City of Palm Springs for their support of this study. Field assistance from Mr. Steven Vinci and logistic assistance from Mr. Jan Anderson of the City of Palm Springs, Department of Facilities were invaluable. In addition to the people helped me with the realization of this dissertation, there are many other friends who helped me with different aspect of my PhD life: Shaahin Amini, Haamun Kalantari, Arman Haghighi, Dr. Maryam Shafahi, Melina Roshandel, Amin Akbari, and Sara Rostami. At the end I would like to thank my girlfriend Ms. Yasaman Samei who has been a great source of motivation and inspiration during the last 4 years and great thanks go to my families: my lovely mother and father, Shahrzad and Bahram Pournazeri, and my v wonderful sister and brother, Shaghayegh and Mohammad, who supported me throughout my whole life. My research was supported by the California Energy Commission (Grant # CIEE MAQ-07-03). vi Dedicated to my lovely mother and father, Shahrzad and Bahram vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Plume Rise and Dispersion of Emissions from Low Level Buoyant Sources in Urban Areas by Sam Pournazeri Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Mechanical Engineering University of California, Riverside, June 2012 Dr. Marko Princevac, Chairperson The projected increase in distributed power generation (DG) has given rise to the concerns on the air quality impact of small power plants located in urban areas. In order to estimate this impact, there is a need for a model that can treat plume rise and dispersion of a buoyant release in an inhomogeneous urban boundary layer whose structure is governed by complex surface characteristics. Such a model requires three essential ingredients: 1) a realistic treatment of the interaction between the highly turbulent urban canopy layer and the turbulent plume spread, 2) a plume rise model that can accounts for the flow modifications caused by buildings, and 3) an appropriate estimate of the height of the nocturnal urban boundary layer. Comprehensive laboratory and field studies were conducted to investigate each of these elements separately. Ground level concentrations (GLC) associated with a modeled DG were measured inside the water channel under different surrounding building geometries. Results from these measurements indicated that surrounding buildings induce vigorous vertical mixing which increase the near source GLC. Further investigations focused on the plume rise from these sources. The results from plume rise measurements viii suggested that plume exiting the DG stack can be significantly impacted by the flows induced by surrounding buildings. In addition to dispersion and plume rise measurements, a field study was conducted in Riverside, CA and the structure of the nocturnal urban boundary layer was investigated over three different nights. Results from these measurements helped us to develop a semi-empirical model that can predict the height of the stable boundary layer. Although we were able to reasonably understand and develop models to predict the micrometeorology as well as plume rise and spread; we concluded that simple Gaussian dispersion models have limited performance in predicting the concentrations associated with urban sources due to the substantial complexity involved with the urban dispersion process. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 2 Background ............................................................................................................... 10 2.1 Vertical Structure of Atmospheric Boundary Layer .......................................... 10 2.2 Surface Layer Similarity .................................................................................... 12 2.2.1 The Daytime Boundary Layer .................................................................... 15 2.2.2 The Night Time Boundary Layer ................................................................ 17 2.3 Gaussian Dispersion Model ............................................................................... 19 2.3.1 Treatment of Boundaries............................................................................. 21 2.3.2 Plume Spread Formulation ......................................................................... 22 2.4 Plume Rise.......................................................................................................... 24 2.4.1 Plume Rise Equations for Neutral Stability Condition ............................... 25 2.4.2 Plume Rise Equations for Stably Stratified Condition ............................... 29 2.4.3 Final Plume Rise Equations ........................................................................ 33 3 A Field Study on Dispersion of Emissions from Low Level Buoyant Sources in Urban Areas ...................................................................................................................... 35 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 35 3.2 Field Study ......................................................................................................... 39 3.3 Simple Gaussian Model Performance ................................................................ 45 3.3.1 Model Formulation ..................................................................................... 45 3.4 Results ................................................................................................................ 48 3.5 Asymptotic Behavior.......................................................................................... 53 3.6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 56 4 Experimental Setup ................................................................................................... 59 4.1 Water Channel .................................................................................................... 59 4.2 Concentration measurements system ................................................................. 60 4.3 Velocity Measurement system (PIV) ................................................................. 64 4.4 Plume Visualization Technique ......................................................................... 65 x 5 Scaling of Urban Plume Rise and Dispersion in Water Channels and Wind Tunnels ………………………………………………………………………………………67 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 67 5.2 Flow Similarity ..................................................................................................