Unstructured CFD for Wind

Turbine Analysis
C. Eric Lynch and Marilyn Smith
Daniel Guggenheim School of
Aerospace Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, USA
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Wind availability: Egypt
Extremely high wind
availability on Red
Sea coast
Good to moderate
wind availability in
other portions
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Elastic deformation
Unsteady, separated flow
Full configuration
Siting,
approximate
models
Yaw error
Horns Rev
offshore wind
farm, Denmark
Interactions
Wind Turbine Aeromechanics
Atmospheric boundary layer
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Numerical Advances
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Euler/Navier-Stokes Formulations
Major goal of Euler/Navier-Stokes methods was ability to
capture nonlinear effects without resorting to lower-fidelity
methods that need empirical models
Formulations include structured and unstructured, overset,
chimera, etc., most typically finite-volume or finite-difference
Dissipation of the wake vorticity remains biggest issue in
long-age wake problems
Grids too large for engineering applications
Restrictive computational requirements
Other research areas:
Turbulence modeling
Transition from laminar to turbulent flows
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Emerging Technologies
Reduced Unsteady Blade Models
Intelligent Algorithms for CFD Spatial and Temporal
Multi-scales
Improved Hybrid Methods to Resolve the Far Wake:
Cartesian CFD with Grid Adaptation/Refinement
Vorticity Transport Methods
Vorticity Confinement Methods
Vortex Element Methods
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
CFD Methods
National Research Codes
e.g., OVERFLOW, FUN3D
Pro: CS supported, many features, source code, no cost
Con: Access by US citizens only
Commercial Codes
e.g., FLUENT, CFD++
Pro: Access by everyone, CS supported, many features
Con: Executables only, pay to use, highly dissipative to improve
code robustness
International Research Code
OpenFOAM
Pro: Access by everyone, many developers support, no cost
Con: Not as many features as other two categories
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Prior CFD Efforts
Hybrid RANS-VE method for single blade (Sankar et al.)
Incompressible, non-inertial (Sorensen et al. 2002)
Pinpointing of separation as source of unsteadiness (Le
Pape and Lecanu 2004)
Structured overset (Duque 1999)
Comparison of structured overset with comprehensive
analysis (Duque 2003)
Time-accurate overset incompressible with tower (Zahle
2004, 2007)
Unstructured non-inertial with grid adaptation (Potsdam,
2009)
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Importance of 1urbu|ence mode||ng
Turbulence
Scales
Eddies
with
Energy
Inertial
Subrange
Viscous
Range
RANS
VLES
LES
DNS
Statistical Modeling
of Turbulence
100%
0%
Hybrid RANS-LES
RANS
Experiment
1
1
Wilcox, D. C., Turbulence Modeling for CFD, DCW Ind., 2004
L
l
!
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Hybrid RANS/LES
Use RANS near the wall where finest grids are required
Use LES away from wall to model largest turbulent eddies
Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) is a common form of
hybrid model
Georgia Tech HRLES-sgs model:
HRLES-sgs shown to capture more
physics and provide better performance predictions even
on RANS mesh sizes
RANS based on Menters k-" SST, solving for
turbulent kinetic energy and dissipation
LES based on Menon and Kim constant
coefficient k-# model
Two sets of equations are linearly blended
using a blending function
RANS
LES
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
SST HRLES
HRLES-sgs versus RANS
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Attempt to emulate wind tunnel tests of Berg and
Zayas (2008)
DU97 flatback airfoil with 10% thick trailing edge
Wind tunnel wall porous effects not known
Compressible, M = 0.2
Re = 3 x 10
6
! = 10
o

"t = 0.005,
~ 500 steps/cycle
Flatback airfoil test case
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Computational Grids
Results vary significantly with grid topology/resolution:
1. Prismatic with tunnel walls, 5h/33, 108k nodes per plane,
periodic BC
2. Hex overset with farfield boundaries, 5h/33, 7.2M nodes
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
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Vortex shedding: Q criterion
rlsmauc,
w/ Lunnel walls,
perlodlc 8C ln
spanwlse dlr.
Pex grld,
overseL,
fareld 8Cs
SS1 P8LLS
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Mean forces and Strouhal number
Gr|d Mode| Code Mean CL Mean CD Strouha|
- LxperlmenL - 1.37 0.13 0.033 0.003 0.24 0.01
rlsmauc wlLh walls SS1 lun 1.87 0.0493 0.088
P8LLS lun 1.88 0.0740 0.088, 0.13
Pex overseL, fareld SS1 lun 1.613 0.039 0.177
P8LLS lun 1.647 0.061 0.182
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
NREL Phase VI cases
7, 13, and 15 m/s upwind baseline cases
at zero yaw
Compared against Sequence S (no
probes, free transition) and Sequence M
(no probes, tripped)
Found very few transitional effects, so only
untripped results shown here
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
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Full Wind Turbine Grids
2.6M nodes per blade volume grid
129k surface triangles per blade
7.2M total
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Integrated loads
W|nd speed
(m]s)
Code 1urb.
mode|
koot ap bend|ng
moment (N-m)
1orque
(N-m)
13 Lxp. S 2730 260 1172 93
lun3u SS1 3067 922
lun3u P8LLS 2898 646
Cl SS1 2789 988
Unstructured method captures root bending moment
within experimental limits
Low torque predictions common to structured mesh
as well
Blade tip modeling inconsistencies were observed.
CvL8lLCW resulLs courLesy of ur. Chrls SLone, !"#$%&'(")'* ,-./)-/0 11!
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Instantaneous streamlines
SST
HRLES
30% span 47% span 95% span
Instantaneous streamlines at 0 degrees azimuth
63% span 80% span
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Rotor near wake: Q criterion
k-w SST HRLES
Q = 1 x 10
-4
iso-surfaces, colored by vorticity magnitude, after 5 revs
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Blade Pressure Distributions
Cp at 30% span
Cp at 95% span
Well within experimental error bars near root.
Less so at tip where grid problems are most pronounced
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Actuator Methods
A compromise between full rotor CFD and lower
fidelity methods
Based on momentum theory
Remove the rotor and model its influence on the
flow field
Can be implemented as a pressure discontinuity
BC or as body forces (source terms) in interior
Efficient because need not model blade
geometry or boundary layers
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Actuator blades/lines
Locate sources along lines or
moving surfaces
Source strength comes from BEM
or comprehensive methods
Actuator blades Actuator disc
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Actuator blade improvements
Sources must be associated with a grid node,
entailing a search at each time step recent
work increases search speed by 20%
Coupling with DYMORE to use its finite-state
aerodynamics model to determine source
strengths with azimuth
T. Renaud, M. Potsdam, D. M. OBrien, Jr., and M. J.
Smith, Evaluation of Isolated Fuselage and Rotor-
Fuselage Interaction Using CFD, 60th AHS Annual
Forum, Baltimore, MD, June 2004.
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Current & Future work
Improve quality of surface definition
Evaluate sensitivity to grid quality and spacing
Transition model for critical speed (10m/s)
Yawed cases to better demonstrate advantages of
full configuration CFD
Use incompressible method to avoid low Mach
converge and accuracy problems
CFD-CSD coupling to capture blade flexibility
Addition of atmospheric boundary layer model
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Conclusions
Hybrid turbulence models improve sectional loads
and surface pressures in separated regions
With HRLES, more of the unsteady wake physics
is observed in the rotor wake
Grids cannot be readily used from their structured
counterparts as they can result in poor
unstructured meshes
Actuator blades hold promise to model wind farms
by capturing individual rotor wakes
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010
Acknowledgments

Work supported by NSF Project 0731034,
Advancing Wind Turbine Analysis and
Design for Sustainable Energy
Teragrid computing resources hosted at
NCSA, Purdue, and LONI were used
Thanks to Scott Schreck for the NREL
Phase VI datasets
US-Egypt Workshop on Wind Energy Development
Cairo, Egypt, March 22-24, 2010