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Anthropogenic climate change is approaching predicted tipping points and there is an urgent need to de-carbonize energy systems on a global scale. Generation technologies that do not emit greenhouse gas need to be rapidly deployed, and energy grids need to be updated to accommodate an intermittent fluctuating supply. Rapidly advancing battery technology, cost reduction of solar and wind power and other emerging generation technologies are making the needed changes technically and economically feasible. Extracting energy from fast-flowing tidal currents using turbines akin to those used in wind farms, offers a reliable and predictable source of GHG free energy. The tidal power industry has established the technical feasibility of tidal turbines, and is presently up-scaling deployments from single isolated units to large tidal farms containing many turbines. However there remains significant economic uncertainty in financing such projects, partially due to uncertainty in predicting the long-term energy yield. Since energy yield is used in calculating the project revenue, it is of critical importance. Predicting yield for a prospective farm has not received sufficient attention in the tidal power literature. this task has been the primary motivation for this thesis work, which focuses on establishing and validating simulation-based procedures to predict flows through large tidal farms with many turbines, including the back effects of the turbines. This is a challenging problem because large tidal farms may alter tidal flows on large scales, and the slow-moving wake downstream of each rotor influences the inflow to other rotors, influencing their performance and loading. Additionally, tidal flow variation on diurnal and monthly timescales requires long-duration analysis to obtain meaningful statistics that can be used for forecasting. This thesis presents a hybrid simulation method that uses 2D coastal flow simulations to predict tidal flows over long durations, including the influence of turbines, combined with higher-resolution 3D simulations to predict how wakes and local bathymetry influence the power of each turbine in a tidal farm. The two simulation types are coupled using a method of bins to reduce the computational cost within reasonable limits. The method can be used to compute detailed 3D flow fields, power and loading on each turbine in the farm, energy yield and the impact of the farm on tidal amplitude and phase. The method is demonstrated to be computationally tractable with modest high-performance computing resources and therefore are of immediate value for informing turbine placement, comparing turbine farm-layout cases and forecasting yield, and may be implemented in future automated layout optimization algorithms. / Graduate

Le contrôle des tourbillons de sillages d'aéronefs permet de réduire leur dangerosité et d'augmenter par conséquent le débit de décollages et d'atterrissages dans les aéroports. Ce contrôle permettrait également d'agir sur la formation des rainées de condensation et des cirrus artificiels en haute atmosphère dans le but de réduire le forçage radiatif terrestre causé par l'aviation. Brion (2014) ont montré par analyse de stabilité modale que le dipôle de Lamb-Chaplygin, souvent utilisé comme un modèle représentatif des tourbillons de sillage en champ lointain, est bidimensionnellement instable à des nombres de Reynolds faibles. Nous étendons premièrement cette analyse de stabilité modale bidimensionnelle à des modèles de dipôles plus réalistes, pour une large gamme de rapport d'aspect, et obtenons, à faibles nombre de Reynolds, des instabilités de même nature (modes de déplacement) que pour le dipôle de Lamb-Chaplygin. Nous montrons cependant que la croissance des instabilités observées dépend fortement du rapport d'aspect du dipôle, et que cette croissance est fortement diminuée lorsque la diffusion du dipôle est prise en compte. Nous étudions ensuite la stabilité bidimensionnelle transitoire en champ lointain (dipôles) et en champ proche (nappes de vorticité), en atmosphères homogène et stratifiée. Dans tous les cas, les perturbations optimales sont des spirales de vorticité orientées à contre-cisaillement et situées en périphérie des tourbillons, qui conduisent in fine aux instabilités écrites par l'analyse modale grâce à un mécanisme de contamination du cœur des tourbillons, initialement identifié par Antkowiak & Brancher 2004 sur un tourbillon isolé. / Aircraft wake vortex control allows for reducing of their dangerousness and consequently improve airport take-off / landing requencies. Contrails and artificial cirrus clouds formation could also be influenced through this control of wake vortices and allow for reducing of terrestrial radiative forcing generated by aviation. Brion (2014) have shown by a modal stability analysis that the Lamb-Chaplygin dipole, often used as a far-field model for aircraft wake vortices, is unstable to two-dimensional perturbations at Iow Reynolds numbers. We first extend this twodimensional modal stability analysis to more realistic dipole models, for a Wide range of aspect ratios, and obtain, for Iow Reynolds numbers, instabilities of the same nature (displacement modes) as for the Lamb-Chaplygin dipole. However, we show that the growth of those modes depends greatly on the dipole aspect ratio, and that this growth is greatly diminished hen the dipole diffusion is taken into account. We then study two-dimensional transient growth for far-field models (dipoles) and near-field models (vorticity sheets), in homogeneous and stratified atmospheres. ln all cases, optimal perturbations are vorticity spirals oriented against shear and located at the periphery of the vortices, which eventually lead to development of the instabilities described in the modal analysis through a contamination mechanism of the vortex cores, initially identified by Antkowiak & Brancher (2004) for an isolated vortex.