Rights statement: This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Energy. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Energy, 128, 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2017.04.017
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Darrieus wind turbine blade unsteady aerodynamics
T2 - a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes CFD assessment
AU - Balduzzi, Francesco
AU - Drofelnik, Jernej
AU - Bianchini, Alessandro
AU - Ferrara, Giovanni
AU - Ferrari, Lorenzo
AU - Campobasso, Michele Sergio
N1 - This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Energy. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Energy, ??, ?, 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2017.04.017
PY - 2017/6/1
Y1 - 2017/6/1
N2 - Energized by the recent rapid progress in high-performance computing and the growing availability of large computational resources, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is offering a cost-effective, versatile and accurate means to improve the understanding of the unsteady aerodynamics of Darrieus wind turbines, increase their efficiency and delivering more cost-effective and structurally sound designs.In this study, a Navier-Stokes CFD research code featuring a very high parallel efficiency was used to thoroughly investigate the three-dimensional unsteady aerodynamics of a Darrieus rotor blade. Highly spatially and temporally resolved unsteady simulations were carried out using more than 16,000 processor cores on an IBM BG/Q cluster. The study aims at providing a detailed description and quantification of the main three-dimensional effects associated with the periodic motion of this turbine type, including tip losses, dynamic stall, vortex propagation and blade/wake interaction. Presented results reveal that the three-dimensional flow effects affecting Darrieus rotor blades are significantly more complex than assumed by the lower-fidelity models often used for design applications, and strongly vary during the rotor revolution. A comparison of the CFD integral estimates and the results of a blade-element momentum code is also presented to highlight strengths and weaknesses of low-fidelity codes for Darrieus turbine design.The reported CFD results may provide a valuable and reliable benchmark for the calibration of lower-fidelity models, which are still key to industrial design due to their very high execution speed.
AB - Energized by the recent rapid progress in high-performance computing and the growing availability of large computational resources, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is offering a cost-effective, versatile and accurate means to improve the understanding of the unsteady aerodynamics of Darrieus wind turbines, increase their efficiency and delivering more cost-effective and structurally sound designs.In this study, a Navier-Stokes CFD research code featuring a very high parallel efficiency was used to thoroughly investigate the three-dimensional unsteady aerodynamics of a Darrieus rotor blade. Highly spatially and temporally resolved unsteady simulations were carried out using more than 16,000 processor cores on an IBM BG/Q cluster. The study aims at providing a detailed description and quantification of the main three-dimensional effects associated with the periodic motion of this turbine type, including tip losses, dynamic stall, vortex propagation and blade/wake interaction. Presented results reveal that the three-dimensional flow effects affecting Darrieus rotor blades are significantly more complex than assumed by the lower-fidelity models often used for design applications, and strongly vary during the rotor revolution. A comparison of the CFD integral estimates and the results of a blade-element momentum code is also presented to highlight strengths and weaknesses of low-fidelity codes for Darrieus turbine design.The reported CFD results may provide a valuable and reliable benchmark for the calibration of lower-fidelity models, which are still key to industrial design due to their very high execution speed.
KW - navier-stokes computational fluid dynamics
KW - Darrieus wind turbine aerodynamics, unsteady Navier-Stokes simulations, low-speed preconditioning, Shear-Stress Transport turbulence model
KW - supercomputing
KW - three-dimensional losses
KW - engineering design
U2 - 10.1016/j.energy.2017.04.017
DO - 10.1016/j.energy.2017.04.017
M3 - Journal article
VL - 128
SP - 550
EP - 563
JO - Energy
JF - Energy
SN - 0360-5442
ER -