There is today a significant interest in harvesting renewable energy, specifically wind energy, in offshore and urban environments. Vertical axis wind turbines get increasing attention since they are able to capture the wind from any direction. They are relatively easy to install and to transport, cheaper to build and maintain, and quite safe for humans and birds. Detailed computer simulations of the fluid dynamics of wind turbines provide an enhanced understanding of the technology and may guide design improvements. In this paper, we simulate the turbulent flow past a vertical axis wind turbine for a range of rotation angles in parked and rotating conditions. We propose the method of Direct Finite Element Simulation in a rotating ALE framework, abbreviated as DFS-ALE. The simulation results are validated against experimental data in the form of force measurements. We find that the simulation results are stable with respect to mesh refinement and that we capture well the general shape of the variation of force measurements over the rotation angles.

The Bloch–Torrey equation describes the evolution of the spin (usually water proton) magnetization under the influence of applied magnetic field gradients and is commonly used in numerical simulations for diffusion MRI and NMR. Microscopic heterogeneity inside the imaging voxel is modeled by interfaces inside the simulation domain, where a discontinuity in the magnetization across the interfaces is produced via a permeability coefficient on the interfaces. To avoid having to simulate on a computational domain that is the size of an entire imaging voxel, which is often much larger than the scale of the microscopic heterogeneity as well as the mean spin diffusion displacement, smaller representative volumes of the imaging medium can be used as the simulation domain. In this case, the exterior boundaries of a representative volume either must be far away from the initial positions of the spins or suitable boundary conditions must be found to allow the movement of spins across these exterior boundaries.

Many approaches have been taken to solve the Bloch–Torrey equation but an efficient high-performance computing framework is still missing. In this paper, we present formulations of the interface as well as the exterior boundary conditions that are computationally efficient and suitable for arbitrary order finite elements and parallelization. In particular, the formulations are based on the partition of unity concept which allows for a discontinuous solution across interfaces conforming with the mesh with weak enforcement of real (in the case of interior interfaces) and artificial (in the case of exterior boundaries) permeability conditions as well as an operator splitting for the exterior boundary conditions. The method is straightforward to implement and it is available in FEniCS for moderate-scale simulations and in FEniCS-HPC for large-scale simulations. The order of accuracy of the resulting method is validated in numerical tests and a good scalability is shown for the parallel implementation. We show that the simulated dMRI signals offer good approximations to reference signals in cases where the latter are available and we performed simulations for a realistic model of a neuron to show that the method can be used for complex geometries.

We develop a PUFEM–Partition of Unity Finite Element Method to impose slip velocity boundary conditions on conforming internal interfaces for a fluid-structure interaction model. The method facilitates a straightforward implementation on the FEniCS/FEniCS-HPC platform. We show two results for 2D model problems with the implementation on FEniCS: (1) optimal convergence rate is shown for a stationary Navier-Stokes flow problem, and (2) the slip velocity conditions give qualitatively the correct result for the Euler flow. 

The Bloch-Torrey partial differential equation can be used to describe the evolution of the transverse magnetization of the imaged sample under the influence of diffusion-encoding magnetic field gradients inside the MRI scanner. The integral of the magnetization inside a voxel gives the simulated diffusion MRI signal. This paper proposes a finite element discretization on manifolds in order to efficiently simulate the diffusion MRI signal in domains that have a thin layer or a thin tube geometrical structure. The variable thickness of the three-dimensional domains is included in the weak formulation established on the manifolds. We conducted a numerical study of the proposed approach by simulating the diffusion MRI signals from the extracellular space (a thin layer medium) and from neurons (a thin tube medium), comparing the results with the reference signals obtained using a standard three-dimensional finite element discretization. We show good agreements between the simulated signals using our proposed method and the reference signals for a wide range of diffusion MRI parameters. The approximation becomes better as the diffusion time increases. The method helps to significantly reduce the required simulation time, computational memory, and difficulties associated with mesh generation, thus opening the possibilities to simulating complicated structures at low cost for a better understanding of diffusion MRI in the brain.

The numerical simulation of the diffusion MRI signal arising from complex tissue micro-structures is helpful for understanding and interpreting imaging data as well as for designing and optimizing MRI sequences. The discretization of the Bloch-Torrey equation by finite elements is a more recently developed approach for this purpose, in contrast to random walk simulations, which has a longer history. While finite elements discretization is more difficult to implement than random walk simulations, the approach benefits from a long history of theoretical and numerical developments by the mathematical and engineering communities. In particular, software packages for the automated solutions of partial differential equations using finite elements discretization, such as FEniCS, are undergoing active support and development. However, because diffusion MRI simulation is a relatively new application area, there is still a gap between the simulation needs of the MRI community and the available tools provided by finite elements software packages. In this paper, we address two potential difficulties in using FEniCS for diffusion MRI simulation. First, we simplified software installation by the use of FEniCS containers that are completely portable across multiple platforms. Second, we provide a portable simulation framework based on Python and whose code is open source. This simulation framework can be seamlessly integrated with cloud computing resources such as Google Colaboratory notebooks working on a web browser or with Google Cloud Platform with MPI parallelization. We show examples illustrating the accuracy, the computational times, and parallel computing capabilities. The framework contributes to reproducible science and open-source software in computational diffusion MRI with the hope that it will help to speed up method developments and stimulate research collaborations.

We compare three different methodologies for simulation of turbulent flow past a vertical axis wind turbine: (i) full resolution of the turbine blades in a Direct Finite Element Simulation (DFS), (ii) implicit representation of the turbine blades in a 3D Actuator Line Method (ALM), and (iii) implicit representation of the turbine blades as sources in a Vortex Model (VM). The integrated normal force on one blade is computed for a range of azimuthal angles, and is compared to experimental data for the different tip speed ratios, 2.55, 3.44 and 4.09.