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The scope of the paper is to present an efficient numerical method that predicts: (a) wind turbine aerodynamic loads and power; (b) wind turbine noise source; (c) long distance wind turbine noise source propagation. The numerical methods involved in this study are a combination of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind turbine aeroacoustic methods. The results from the CFD simulation provide necessary information of wind turbine power and thrust etc. The 2D Actuator Disc (AD) theory is applied for such a purpose. The computational efficiency becomes very high while using a steady 2D CFD approach. The flow geometry at each blade element is required for wind turbine noise source calculations. The predicted wind turbine noise source is the starting field for long distance noise propagation model which is based on solving the Parabolic Equations (PE) in the frequency domain. Results showed that the integrated wind turbine flow-acoustic prediction method is capable of calculating wind turbine aerodynamic, aerodynamic noise source and long range sound propagation.

In the present study, a large number of acoustic simulations are carried out for a low noise airfoil with different Trailing Edge Serrations (TES). The Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FWH) acoustic analogy is used for noise prediction at trailing edge. The acoustic solver is running on the platform of our in-house incompressible flow solver EllipSys3D. The flow solution is first obtained from the Large Eddy Simulation (LES), the acoustic part is then carried out based on the instantaneous hydrodynamic pressure and velocity field. To obtain the time history data of sound pressure, the flow quantities are integrated around the airfoil surface through the FWH approach. For all the simulations, the chord based Reynolds number is around 1.5x106. In the test matrix, the effects from angle of attack, the TE flap angle, the length/width of the TES are investigated. Even though the airfoil under investigation is already optimized for low noise emission, most numerical simulations and wind tunnel experiments show that the noise level is further decreased by adding the TES device.

Wind turbine sound generation and propagation phenomena are inherently time dependent, hence tools that incorporate the dynamic nature of these two issues are needed for accurate modelling. In this paper, we investigate the sound propagation from a wind turbine by considering the effects of unsteady flow around it and time dependent source characteristics. For the acoustics modelling we employ the Parabolic Equation (PE) method while Large Eddy Simulation (LES) as well as synthetically generated turbulence fields are used to generate the medium flow upon which sound propagates. Unsteady acoustic simulations are carried out for three incoming wind shear and various turbulence intensities, using a moving source approach to mimic the rotating turbine blades. The focus of the present paper is to study the near and far field amplitude modulation characteristics and time evolution of Sound Pressure Level (SPL).

The Actuator Line/ Navier-stokes technique is used to compute the incompressible flow around a full scale Nordtank 500kW wind turbine under different complex flow conditions such as atmospheric turbulence and wind shear. The flow field is used as an input to aeroacoustic calculations based on; a semi empirical noise model; and a Navier-Stokes based computational aeroacoustic code (CAA). The Navier-Stokes based approach is solving acoustic perturbation equations and is capable of taking propagation and ground effects into account, but is limited to low frequency noise due to feasible mesh resolution, and due to the simplification in the actuator line method using body forces to represent the blade. Noise levels are compared to field measurements of a Nordtank 500kW wind turbine at different wind speeds and inflow profiles.

The CQU-DTU-LN1 series of airfoils were designed with an objective of high lift and low noise emission. In the design process, the aerodynamic performance is obtained using XFOIL while noise emission is obtained with the BPM model. In this paper we present some validations of the designed CQU-DTU-LN118 airfoil by using wind tunnel measurements in the acoustic wind tunnel located at Virginia Tech and numerical computations with the inhouse Q3uic and EllipSys 2D/3D codes. To show the superiority of the new airfoils, comparisons with a NACA64618 airfoil are made. For the aerodynamic features, the designed Cl and Cl/Cd agrees well with the experiment and are in general higher than those of the NACA airfoil. For the acoustic features, the noise emission of the LN118 airfoil is compared with the acoustic measurements and that of the NACA airfoil. Comparisons show that the BPM model can predict correctly the noise changes.

Tip loss correction is known to play an important role for engineering prediction of wind turbine performance. There are two different types of tip loss corrections: tip corrections on momentum theory and tip corrections on airfoil data. In this paper, we study the latter using detailed CFD computations for wind turbines with sharp tip. Using the technique of determination of angle of attack and the CFD results for a NordTank 500 kW rotor, airfoil data are extracted and a new tip loss function on airfoil data is derived. To validate, BEM computations with the new tip loss function are carried out and compared with CFD results for the NordTank 500 kW turbine and the NREL 5 MW turbine. Comparisons show that BEM with the new tip loss function can predict correctly the loading near the blade tip.

This paper presents the aerodynamic design of low noise wind turbine blades using Betz and Joukowski concepts. The aerodynamic model is based on Blade Element Momentum theory whereas the aeroacoustic prediction model is based on the BPM model. The investigation is started with a 3MW baseline/reference turbine rotor with a diameter of 80 m. To reduce the noise emission from the baseline rotor, the rotor is reconstructed with the low noise CQU-DTU-LN1 series of airfoils which has been tested in the acoustic wind tunnel located at Virginia Tech. Finally, 3MW low noise turbine rotors are designed using the concepts of Betz and Joukowski, and the CQU-DTU-LN1 series of airfoils. Performance analysis shows that the newly designed turbine rotors can achieve an overall noise reduction of 6 dB and 1.5 dB(A) with a similar power output as compared to the reference rotor.

This paper concerns a numerical study of employing an adaptive trailing edge flap to control the lift of an airfoil subject to unsteady inflow conditions. The periodically varying inflow is generated by two oscillating airfoils, which are located upstream of the controlled airfoil. To establish the control system, a standard PID controller is implemented in a finite volume based incompressible flow solver. An immersed boundary method is applied to treat the problem of simulating a deformable airfoil trailing edge. The flow field is solved using a 2D Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes finite volume solver. In order to more accurately simulate wall bounded flows around the immersed boundary, a modified boundary condition is introduced in the k- ω turbulence model. As an example, turbulent flow over a NACA 64418 airfoil with a deformable trailing edge is investigated. Results from numerical simulations are convincing and may give some highlights for practical implementations of trailing edge flap to a wind turbine rotor blade

The aerodynamic performance of blunt trailing edge airfoils generated from the DU- 91-W2-250, DU-97-W-300 and DU-96-W-350 airfoils by enlarging the thickness of trailing edge symmetrically from the location of maximum thickness to chord to the trailing edge were analyzed by using CFD and RFOIL methods at a chord Reynolds number of 3 × 106. The goal of this study is to analyze the aerodynamic performance of blunt trailing edge airfoils with different thicknesses of trailing edge and maximum thicknesses to chord. The steady results calculated by the fully turbulent k-ω SST, transitional k-ω SST model and RFOIL all show that with the increase of thickness of trailing edge, the linear region of lift is extended and the maximum lift also increases, the increase rate and amount of lift become limited gradually at low angles of attack, while the drag increases dramatically. For thicker airfoils with larger maximum thickness to chord length, the increment of lift is larger than that of relatively thinner airfoils when the thickness of blunt trailing edge is increased from 5% to 10% chord length. But too large lift can cause abrupt stall which is profitless for power output. The transient characteristics of blunt trailing edge airfoils are caused by blunt body vortices at low angles of attack, and by the combined effect of separation and blunt body vortices at large angles of attack. With the increase of thickness of blunt trailing edge, the vibration amplitudes of lift and drag curves increase. The transient calculations over-predict the lift at large angles of attack and drag at all angles of attack than the steady calculations which is likely to be caused by the artificial restriction of the flow in two dimensions.

Average power losses due to multiple wind turbine wakes in the large offshore wind farm is studied in this paper using properly modified k-ω SST turbulence models. The numerical simulations are carried out by the actuator disc methodology implemented in the flow solver EllipSys3D. In these simulations, the influence of different inflow conditions such as wind direction sectors are considered and discussed. Comparisons with measurements in terms of wake speed ratio and the corresponding power outputs show that the modified turbulence models had significant improvements; especially the SST-Csust model reflects the best ability in predicting the wake defect. The investigations of various inflow angles reveal that the agreement between predicted and measured data is improved for the wider sector case than the narrow case because of the wind direction uncertainty.

We address the issue of noise emission from a 2.3 MW SWT-2.3-93 wind turbine and compare simulations from a semi-empirical acoustic model with measurements. The noise measurements were taken at the Hovsore test site for large wind turbines. The acoustic model is based on the Blade-Element Momentum (BEM) technique and various semi-empirical acoustic relations. The comparison demonstrates a generally good agreement between predicted and measured noise levels. The acoustic model is further employed to carry out a parametrical study to optimize the performance/noise of the wind turbine by changing tip speed and pitch setting. We show that it is possible to reduce the noise level up to 2 dB(A) without sacrificing too much the power yield.

In this paper, a high-order technique to accurately predict flow-generated noise is introduced. The technique consists of solving the viscous incompressible flow equations and inviscid acoustic equations using a incompressible/compressible splitting technique. The incompressible flow equations are solved using the in-house flow solver EllipSys2D/3D which is a second-order finite volume code. The acoustic solution is found by solving the acoustic equations using high-order finite difference schemes. The incompressible flow equations and the acoustic equations are solved at the same time levels where the pressure and the velocities obtained from the incompressible equations form the input to the acoustic equations. To achieve low dissipation and dispersion errors, either Dispersion-Relation-Preserving (DRP) schemes or optimized compact finite difference schemes are used for spatial discretizations of the acoustic equations. The classical fourth-order Runge-Kutta time scheme is applied to the acoustic equations for time discretization.