This thesis reports on a numerical investigation into the three-dimensional flow divergence around a high solidity vertical axis wind turbine. Three-dimensional unsteady Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes simulations of an H-type vertical axis wind turbine were used to examine the impact of turbine aspect ratio and tip speed ratio on the flow divergence. The turbine height was changed to alter the turbine aspect ratio, while keeping the diameter constant, to ensure that the solidity and tip speed ratio values were comparable between the different aspect ratios tested. The power output of the turbine consistently increased with aspect ratio and the optimal tip speed ratio for peak performance was negligibly affected. The flow divergence results showed that larger aspect ratio turbines had significantly more flow divergence with a 1 m/s entrance velocity difference between the smallest and largest cases. These two results where contradictory as a larger aspect ratio turbine was more efficient even though it had a smaller fraction of the upstream flow entering the upwind pass. The reason for this result was that impact of the tip effects, which caused a power reduction near the end of the blades. The distance from the blade tips that experienced a power reduction was constant for turbines of aspect ratio one and greater, resulting in a smaller turbine having a greater fraction of its height effected by the tips. This caused the overall power output for a smaller aspect ratio turbine to be lower even though its centre performance was higher, due to an increased entrance velocity. The change in flow divergence with tip speed ratio was also examined to better understand the driving force behind the divergence. It was found that the turbine power output was not the direct cause of flow divergence. The blade forces, specifically the force generated in the upstream direction had a strong linear correlation with the upstream flow divergence. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

<p>    </p> <p>Irregular control-flow structures like deeply nested conditional branches are common in real-world software applications. Improving the performance and efficiency of such programs is often challenging because it is difficult to analyze and optimize programs with irregular control flow. We observe that real-world programs contain similar or identical computations within different code paths of the conditional branches. Compilers can merge similar code to improve performance or code size. However, existing compiler optimizations like code hoisting/sinking, and tail merging do not fully exploit this opportunity. We propose a new technique called Control-Flow Melding (CFM) that can merge similar code sequences at the control-flow region level. We evaluate CFM in two applications. First, we show that CFM reduces the control divergence in GPU programs and improves the performance. Second, we apply CFM to CPU programs and show its effectiveness in reducing code size without sacrificing performance. In the next part of this dissertation, we investigate how CFM can be extended to improve dynamic test generation techniques like Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE). DSE suffers from path explosion problem when many conditional branches are present in the program. We propose a non-semantics-preserving branch elimination transformation called CFM-SE that reduces the number of symbolic branches in a program. We also provide a framework for detecting and reasoning about false positive bugs that might be added to the program by non-semantics-preserving transformations like CFM-SE. Furthermore, we evaluate CFM-SE on real-world applications and show its effectiveness in improving DSE performance and code coverage. </p>