Full wind turbine design
CTTC has taken part in the OffWindTech (2011-2013) project(link is external), which was lead by KIC-InnoEnergy under the leadership of the European Institute of Innovation of Technology. The aim of the project was to test and stimulate the current available capabilities for offshore wind turbine design. Our group worked on the aerodynamic CFD testing of a industrial-size wind turbine of 5MW power and 126 m rotor diameter.
URANS methods have been successful at portraying averaged pressure and velocities in the fluid domain. Certainly, these models have been very useful since they can predict power accurately in most cases. However, we strongly believe that LES will be taking a progressively more important role as long as computational power increases. The main strength of LES is the capability to aim at unsteady effects which encompasses natural working behavior of wind turbines (i.e. wake-tower interaction) but also control-induced effects (i.e. pitch and yaw controlling).
Our code has been created to aim at unsteady effects so it is capable to reproduce and couple to the CFD models the relative movement of the wind turbine components, as can be seen in the next video.
The wind turbine geometric model is coupled to the CFD code by means of immersed boundary method, feed by level set functions which are used to track the moving parts of the turbine. This method is currently being validated against NREL(link is external) and MEXICO(link is external) experimental cases.
