We study wet cooling tower plume formation involving mesoscale meteorological effects
(such as stratification or compressibility). This was achieved by incorporating transformations
and volume source terms into a pressure based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver
(ANSYS-FLUENT). Moisture dynamics is taken into account with a bulk microphysical
model that was recently implemented into the solver. This model has been validated
against known numerical solutions of idealized two-dimensional dry and wet thermals.
In particular, the overall thermal profile and the liquid water concentration field
indicated good model performance. Model performance has also been compared with measurements
for the formation of a large wet cooling tower plume. Simulations are encouraging
with regard to the predictability of cumulus like plume structures with complex thermal
stratification, the overall liquid water content along the plume axis, and also the
turbulent fluctuations caused by the vertical movements in the plume. The advantage
of this approach is that a uniform physical description can be used for close- and
far-field flow by using a single unstructured mesh with local refinements. This allows
for investigating the finely structured microscale flow phenomena around complex orographic
features in a single framework.
