Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the role of flow structures generated in wind farm control through yaw misalignment. A pair of counter-rotating vortices is shown to be important in deforming the shape of the wake and in explaining the asymmetry of wake steering in oppositely signed yaw angles. We also demonstrate that vortices generated by an upstream turbine that is performing wake steering can deflect wakes of downstream turbines, even if they are themselves aligned.We encourage the development of improvements to control-oriented engineering models of wind farm control, to include the effects of these large-scale flow structures. Such a new model would improve the predictability of control-oriented models. Further, we demonstrate that the vortex structures created in wake steering can lead to greater impact on power generation than currently modeled in control-oriented models. We propose that wind farm controllers can be made more effective if designed to take advantage of these effects.

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The benefits of immersive visualization are primarily anecdotal; there have been few controlled user studies that have attempted to quantify the added value of immersion for problems requiring the manipulation of virtual objects. This research quantifies the added value of immersion for a real-world industrial problem: oil well-path planning. An experiment was designed to compare human performance between an immersive virtual environment (IVE) and a desktop workstation. This work presents the results of sixteen participants who planned the paths of four oil wells. Each participant planned two well-paths on a desktop workstation with a stereoscopic display and two well-paths in a CAVE™-like IVE. Fifteen of the participants completed well-path editing tasks faster in the IVE than in the desktop environment. The increased speed was complimented by a statistically significant increase in correct solutions in the IVE. The results suggest that an IVE allows for faster and more accurate problem solving in a complex three-dimensional domain.

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Supported metal catalysts are commonly used for the hydrogenation and deoxygenation of biomass-derived aromatic compounds in catalytic fast pyrolysis. To date, the substrate–adsorbate interactions under reaction conditions crucial to these processes remain poorly understood, yet understanding this is critical to constructing detailed mechanistic models of the reactions important to catalytic fast pyrolysis. Density functional theory (DFT) has been used in identifying mechanistic details, but many of these works assume surface models that are not representative of realistic conditions, for example, under which the surface is covered with some concentration of hydrogen and aromatic compounds. In this study, we investigate hydrogen-guaiacol coadsorption on Pt(111) using van der Waals-corrected DFT and ab initio thermodynamics over a range of temperatures and pressures relevant to bio-oil upgrading. We find that relative coverage of hydrogen and guaiacol is strongly dependent on the temperature and pressure of the system. Under conditions relevant to ex situ catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP; 620–730 K, 1–10 bar), guaiacol and hydrogen chemisorb to the surface with a submonolayer hydrogen (∼0.44 ML H), while under conditions relevant to hydrotreating (470–580 K, 10–200 bar), the surface exhibits a full-monolayer hydrogen coverage with guaiacol physisorbed to the surface. These results correlate with experimentally observed selectivities, which show ring saturation to methoxycyclohexanol at hydrotreating conditions and deoxygenation to phenol at CFP-relevant conditions. Additionally, the vibrational energy of the adsorbates on the surface significantly contributes to surface energy at higher coverage. Ignoring this contribution results in not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively incorrect interpretation of coadsorption, shifting the phase boundaries by more than 200 K and ∼10–20 bar and predicting no guaiacol adsorption under CFP and hydrotreating conditions. The implications of this work are discussed in the context of modeling hydrogenation and deoxygenation reactions on Pt(111), and we find that only the models representative of equilibrium surface coverage can capture the hydrogenation kinetics correctly. Last, as a major outcome of this work, we introduce a freely available web-based tool, dubbed the Surface Phase Explorer (SPE), which allows researchers to conveniently determine surface composition for any one- or two-component system at thermodynamic equilibrium over a wide range of temperatures and pressures on any crystalline surface using standard DFT output.