Multi-Domain Computation of Wind Turbine Wake Flows

抄録

Wind turbines operate in large arrays in wind farms are facing issues of performance degradation and shortened fatigue life due to the wake ingestion. On the one hand, wind turbine wake aerodynamics include flow scales from turbine blade scale (mm) to turbine rotor scale (m) and wind-farm scale (km) which require computation methods capable of characterizing these scale ranges. On the other hand, simulating high Reynolds numbers and rotating turbulent flows calls for robust, high accuracy numerical methods and special mesh moving techniques. In this paper, we use the Multi-Domain Method (MDM) to divide the long wake computation domain into two shorter subdomains to improve computation efficiency and the Space–Time Variational Multiscale (ST-VMS) method for flow computations with Slip Interfaces (ST-SI) to enable mesh moving and maintain high resolution around turbine blades. We also implement Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) to increase the accuracy of computations. Computation results show the downstream wake evolutions in the near wake are in good agreement with previous experiments studies. The helical tip vortex pattern in near wake is observed by visualizing the velocity flow filed at wind turbine symmetric plane and vorticity with Q criterion.