A S TUDY OF THE INTERNAL BOUNDARY LAYER AND TURBULENCE GENERATED AT THE ALCÂNTARA LAUNCHING CENTER

The region of the Alcântara Space Center (ASC) presents the formation of Internal Boundary Layer (IBL) generated from a change of surface roughness besides a coastal cliff of 40 m. Numerical simulations, experiments in wind tunnel and observational data were used for this study. The numerical simulations and wind tunnel results matched very well, showing that different inclinations of the coastal cliff influences the presence of a re-circulation zone as well as the turbulence intensity. The different angles do not affect the vorticity that ranged between -1600 and +300 s -1 , although they cause alterations in the height of the IBL. In the case of the inclinations with angles lower than 90o the region of recirculation becomes more extensive and with the highest values of IBL (of approximately 30 m). An equation of the type ax b was fitted to the results from the wind tunnel and values of a=16.9 and b=0.19 were