Adjoint-based Calibration of Inlet Boundary Condition for Atmospheric CFD Solvers

Abstract. A continuous adjoint solver is developed for optimization of the inlet velocity profile boundary condition for CFD simulations of the neutral atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). The adjoint solver uses interior domain wind speed observations to compute the gradient of a calibration function with respect to inlet velocity components and wind direction. The solver has been implemented in the open source CFD package OpenFOAM. The sensitivities computed by the newly developed adjoint solver are validated against the second order finite-difference method. Furthermore, the DAKOTA optimization package is coupled with OpenFOAM, and a number of numerical studies are carried out including the calibration of the inlet velocity profile of a 3-D complex domain.