Advanced CFD methods for wind turbine analysis

Horizontal-axis wind turbines operate in a complex, inherently unsteady aerodynamic environment. Even when the rotor is not stalled, the flow over the blades is dominated by three-dimensional (3-D) effects. Stall is accompanied by massive flow separation and vortex shedding over the suction surface of the blades. Under yawed conditions, dynamic stall may be present as well. In all operating conditions, there is bluff-body shedding from the turbine nacelle and support structure which interacts with the rotor wake. In addition, the high aspect ratios of wind turbine blades make them very flexible, leading to substantial aeroelastic deformation of the blades, altering the aerodynamics. Finally, when situated in a wind farm, turbines must operate in the unsteady wake of upstream neighbors.;Though computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has made significant inroads as a research tool, simple, inexpensive methods, such as blade element momentum (BEM) theory, are still the workhorses in wind turbine design and aeroelasticity applications. These methods generally assume a quasi-steady flowfield and use two-dimensional aerodynamic approximations with very limited empirical 3-D corrections. As a result, they are unable to accurately predict rotor loads near the edges of the operating envelope. CFD methods make very few limiting assumptions about the flowfield, and thus have much greater potential for predicting these flows. In this work, a range of unstructured grid CFD techniques for predicting wind turbine loads and aeroelasticity has been developed and applied to a wind turbine configuration of interest.;First, a nearest neighbor search algorithm based on a k-dimensional tree data structure was used to improve the computational efficiency of an approximate unsteady actuator blade method. This method was then shown to predict root and tip vortex locations and strengths similar to an overset method on the same background mesh, but without the computational expense of modeling the blade surfaces. A hybrid Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes / Large Eddy Simulation (HRLES) turbulence model, previously developed for structured grids, was extended to an unstructured framework. It was demonstrated to improve predictions of unsteady loading and shedding frequency in massively separated cases. The sensitivity of the model to highly stretched grid topologies was also explored. For aeroelastic predictions, a methodology for tight coupling between an unstructured CFD solver and a computational structural dynamics tool was developed. Due to the lack of experimental data pertaining to a flexible turbine, the coupling algorithm was validated for a helicopter rotor, but the method is sufficiently general that it can be immediately applied to a wind turbine when suitable correlation data becomes available in the future. Finally, time-accurate overset rotor simulations of a complete turbine---blades, nacelle, and tower---were conducted using both RANS and HRLES turbulence models. The HRLES model was able to accurately predict rotor loads when stalled. In yawed flow, excellent correlations of mean blade loads with experimental data were obtained across the span, and wake asymmetry and unsteadiness were also well-predicted.