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Efficient numerical investigation of flow control on wind turbine rotors under realistic conditions

Subject Area Fluid Mechanics
Term from 2012 to 2020
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 218654480
 
Final Report Year 2020

Final Report Abstract

A computationally efficient aeroelastic simulation tool for wind turbines has been developed. The aerodynamic method, employing a free wake formulation, is one-step above all other medium order fidelity tools that are currently used for wind turbine design and research. To make the application of the aforementioned aerodynamic method feasible for wind turbine design load calculations a main target was the reduction of the computational cost through parallelization and clustering techniques. Furthermore, compared to classical BEM methods, the free wake formulation allows to gain insight into the flow fields surrounding wind turbines which enables their application to a large range of different applications that go beyond the simple performance and load prediction of rotors. This functionality has been demonstrated by performing simulations of wake interaction and rotor wake stability. The functionality of the developed simulation tool was extended with models that account for unsteady aerodynamics and flap operation, actuation. Successively the simulation tool has been applied to perform precursor simulations for wind tunnel tests and CFD simulations. In addition, a large number of numerical validation studies have been carried out to prove the accuracy of the developed simulation tool for the prediction of both: on blade rotor performance and wake velocity distributions. The resulting simulation tool is freely distributed under an open-source license to facilitate wind energy research worldwide and to date has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

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