CAREER: CAS-Climate: Understanding Thermal Transport Processes in Atmospheric Boundary Layer with Utility-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Plants

从目前全球不到20%的水平实现完全的可再生电气化，对能源科学界提出了巨大的挑战。这需要数百万亿千瓦时的可再生能源，主要通过风能和太阳能发电。一个被忽视但至关重要的问题是，从大气表层提取如此巨大的能量是否会改变大气的物理性质，从而导致新的气候变化挑战。这个CAREER项目将重点关注大型太阳能光伏电站是否会改变当地气候。这项研究将对传输过程所产生的大气响应进行参数化，以促进将太阳能发电厂纳入气候模型。该项目将为田纳西州中部的本科生和研究生参与气候变化教育和讨论铺平道路。这项研究的结果将使田纳西理工大学的一个新的“大气传输”课程，一本名为“大气传输”的教科书，以提高科学素养，和一个教育移动的应用程序ATMOSPort。该项目旨在研究近地面大气和数百万个太阳能光伏电池板的人工树冠之间的相互作用。提出了一个两阶段的现场活动和计算流体动力学模拟，以提供对数千英亩的黑暗，炎热，高大，粗糙的公用事业规模的太阳能发电厂的光伏电池板上方的大气边界层内的热传输动力学的理解。所获得的知识将澄清这种巨大的树冠是否会改变当地的气候，并将导致创建准确描述受影响的大气特征的方程。拟议的研究量化了这些影响对各种背景表面条件的重要性，并参数化了工厂的热和机械效应，使气象学家和环境工程师能够有效地将其纳入模型。这一成就将提高公用事业规模光伏电站所在地区大气模拟的准确性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

To achieve complete renewable-based electrification from the current level of less than 20% globally presents great challenges for the energy science community. This requires hundreds of trillions of kilowatt-hours of renewable energy, mainly generated through wind and solar power. One neglected but crucial question is whether extracting such huge amount of energy from the atmosphere's surface layer would alter the atmosphere's physics, leading to new climate change challenges. This CAREER project will focus on addressing whether large-scale solar photovoltaic plants alter the local climate. The research will parameterize the atmospheric response carried out by transport processes to facilitate the inclusion of solar plants in climate models. This project will pave the way for undergraduate and graduate students in middle Tennessee to become engaged in climate change education and discussion. The results of this research will enable a new "Atmospheric Transport" course at Tennessee Technological University, a textbook titled Atmospheric Transport to increase scientific literacy, and an educational mobile app ATMOSPort.This project seeks to study the interactions between the near-ground atmosphere and an artificial canopy of millions of solar photovoltaic panels. A two-stage field campaign and computational fluid dynamics simulations are proposed to provide an understanding of thermal transport dynamics within the atmospheric boundary layer above thousands of acres of dark, hot, tall, and rough Photovoltaic panels of utility-scale solar plants. The knowledge gained will clarify whether such giant canopies alter the local climate and will lead to the creation of equations that accurately describe the affected atmospheric characteristics. The proposed research quantifies the significance of these impacts for various background surface conditions and parameterizes the thermal and mechanical effects of the plant to allow meteorologists and environmental engineers to incorporate them into their models efficiently. This achievement would increase the accuracy of atmospheric simulations within regions where utility-scale photovoltaic plants exist.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.