2. Two operating points were selected for simulation. The lower power The power and thrust for each of the simulations was computed and
case corresponds to a 9 m/s wind speed and 10.3 RPM rotational compared to the results published by Riso1.
speed. The higher power case entails a wind speed of 11 m/s and
a rotational speed of 11.9 RPM. Steady RANS simulations using
the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model were performed for both
conditions, while a full sliding mesh DES simulation was performed
only for the lower power case. All simulations were performed
using a 64 core AMD Opteron cluster with an Infiniband message
passing network. Steady state simulations of the full rotor model
required approximately 10 hours of compute time on the cluster to
reach a steady state solution. Figure 6: Power and thrust comparisons between AcuSolve
and Riso simulations.
Results The AcuSolve results compare well to the Riso simulations, indicating
The steady RANS solution provides detailed information about the that the unstructured meshing/finite element solution methodology
performance of the rotor. The local pressure field on the high and low provides accurate results for this application. Additionally, the DES
pressure side of the blade for the lower power case is shown approach is found to provide similar results as the steady RANS
in Figure 4. simulations. For this application, the additional compute cost of
the DES approach is not warranted if integrated quantities such as
power and thrust are the only items of interest. However, this also
implies that the DES approach produces accurate results and can be
used for inherently transient applications such as acoustic and fluid-
structure interaction simulations.
Conclusions
An unstructured grid based CFD modeling methodology has been
developed and successfully used to simulate the flow around a utility
Figure 4: Surface pressure distribution on the wind
turbine blade. scale wind turbine rotor. The total power and thrust predicted by
the simulations compare favorably with results obtained by other
The CFD solution is also successful at capturing the detailed research groups. To facilitate the ease of performing the full rotor
flow structures in the wake of the turbine. Adequately capturing simulations, all gridding was performed using fully automated
these features requires highly accurate numerical methods to unstructured mesh generation techniques, and post processing was
propagate the wake downstream without the need to use excessive performed using automated batch processing.
compute resources.
The wealth of insight provided by CFD simulations gives designers
and engineers the opportunity to rapidly investigate advanced design
concepts and establish the improvements in efficiency, reliability,
and cost effectiveness that are required to propel wind power
technology into the future. This validation effort represents an
important step in achieving these improvements and can easily be
extended to encompass more complex physics such as sheared wind
conditions, gust events, and fluid structure interaction.
Figure 5: Flow structures in the wake of the 5 MW rotor models. References
The image on the left depicts iso-surfaces of the Q-criterion 1. UPWIND, Aerodynamics and aero-elasticity. Rotor aerodynamics
colored by velocity magnitude. This clearly illustrates the root
and tip vortices as well as the trailing edge vortex sheet.
in atmospheric shear flows. Niels N. Sorensen. Wind Energy
The image on the right is a cut plane showing contours of Department, Risoe National Laboratory,
vorticity in the wake of the rotor. www.risoe.dtu.dk/rispubl/art/2007_140_paper.pdf.