DOCTORAL CANDIDATE
Hamidreza Mohammadpour

SUPERVISORS
Stephanie Giroux, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (UCBL)
Victoria Timchenko, University of New South Wales (UNSW)

Fluid mechanics, Energy, Building Engineering

The purpose of this PHD-thesis relies on impacts of massive integration of photovoltaic (PV) panels and PV power plants within urban environment. Indeed, urban areas are the seat of complex and nonlinear physical phenomena: time variability and intermittency of the solar resource, atmospheric pollution conditions, wind channeling effect and turbulent intensities as well as inter building effects.

Developing an integrated methodology taking into consideration urban multi-physics (including solar radiation and atmospheric boundary layer) and multi-scales (spatial heterogeneities) features appears then as a crucial issue for the evaluation of PV contribution to the heat Island effect.
The objective of this PhD study is to investigate the interaction between the atmospheric boundary layer usually modeled as a logarithmic velocity profile and building integrated PV power systems. In particular, the zero plane displacement (ground) and the roughness length needs to be redefined in accordance.

The work will be based on LES simulations and on data processing methods such as proper orthogonal decomposition in order to identify dynamical and thermal coherent structures that may affect locally turbulent mixing and in consequence the parameters of the atmospheric boundary layer.