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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
The rising costs and highly fluctuating prices of oil and natural gas, as well as their constantly diminishing supplies worldwide, create the need for cheaper, sustainable alternative energy sources. Wind turbines, which harvest wind energy and convert it to electrical power, create such an energy source that is playing an increasingly important role and receiving much attention from government and industry sectors around the world. The Department of Energy has recently established the objective that wind power supply 20% of the US’s energy needs by 2030. Leading-edge wind energy research will be essential in meeting this goal. This very ambitious wind energy goal puts pressure on the wind energy industry research and development to significantly enhance current wind generation capabilities in a relatively short period of time and simultaneously decrease costs associated with wind energy conversion to electricity. This calls for transformative concepts and designs (e.g., a new generation of floating offshore wind turbines) that must be created and analyzed with high-precision scientific and engineering methods and tools. These include complex-geometry, 3D, time dependent, multi-physics predictive simulation methods and software that will play an increasingly important role as demands for wind energy grow. In this talk I will present a collection of numerical methods combined into a single framework, which has the potential for a successful application to wind turbine rotor modeling and simulation. Part 1 of the talk will focus on: 1. The basics of geometry modeling and analysis-suitable geometry construction for wind turbine rotors; 2. The fluid mechanics formulation and its suitability and accuracy for rotating turbulent flows; 3. The coupling of air flow and a rotating rigid body. Part 2 of the presentation will cover structural discretization for wind turbine blades and the details of the fluid–structure interaction computational procedures. The methods developed are applied to the simulation of the NREL 5MW offshore baseline wind turbine rotor. The simulations are performed at realistic wind velocity and rotor speed conditions and at full spatial scale. Validation against published data is presented and possibilities of the newly developed computational framework are illustrated on several examples.
Host: Mikhail Shashkov. shashkov@lanl.gov, 667-4400