CFD : Wind Turbine Simulations

There has been quite some interest lately in modeling and simulating wind turbine flow using CFD operations. Thought, may be my simulation work in this concern may be of interest. I have attached my sample work on computing local wind turbine blade characteristics as well as the wake characteristics generated by these rotating blades.

Boundary condition and set up




Front View of the blades (Meshed)


I used the comfortable ;) sliding mesh techniques to run transient simulations of the rotating turbine blades. Turbulence activated using RNG k-e model. Ofcourse, I am carrying out some LES runs now to check out more interesting eddy characteristics. But, fundamental framework on this transient process remains the same.

All work reported here were of incompressible nature. Air was used as the fluid medium. Geometry of the turbine was generated using some earlier available models from literature. Ofcourse, more complicated profiles can be built based on specifications.

Contours plots of vorticity magnitude around the rotating blades - various increasing time instants (a-j)

Movie of vorticity shedding near the rotating blades - used FieldView for post-processing (could have been better ;)

Plots of Velocity vector to show local flow characteristics

Wake Flow Studies

I carried out several tests with increasing the incoming fluid flow velocity, changing the rotational speeds etc and interesting flow modification appeared throughout the domain.

This is just a preliminary post. I will keep adding some more information with respect to these simulations. More so, if you have any comments on the modeling and/or application, kindly let me know.