Investigation of Global Optimization Method with Multi-Fidelity Analysis for Small Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines

Abstract

In this study, multi-fidelity analysis is investigated for global optimization of a small vertical-axis wind turbine. Both low- and high-fidelity models are evaluated by ANSYS Fluent based on unsteady computational fluid dynamics analysis. The differences in fidelity are given from the resolution of computational grids and the number of simulated rotations. The low-fidelity model with a coarser grid and fewer number of simulated rotations can be evaluated at about 8 % of the computational cost of the high-fidelity model. The correlation of a performance value between the high- and low-fidelity models is about 0.874. The low-fidelity model is considered to be useful for efficient global design optimization because it can obtain similar trends to the high-fidelity model with a smaller computational cost.