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In the present work, CFD simulations of the DU96-W-180 airfoil at 26 and 24 deg. angles of attack were performed. 2D RANS and 3D DES computations with non-moving and prescribed motion airfoil suspensions were carried out. The openings of the lift coefficient loops predicted by CFD were different than those predicted by engineering models. The average lift slope of the loops from the 3D CFD had opposite sign than the one from 2D CFD. Trying to model the 3D behaviour with the engineering models proved difficult. The disagreement between the 2D CFD, 3D CFD and the engineering models indicates that further investigations are needed and that caution should be taken when applying engineering models in connection with aeroelastic simulations. Nonetheless, the results of the 2D CFD, 3D CFD and the engineering models indicate that the associated aerodynamic damping may be higher than that predicted by state of the art aeroelastic codes.

In this work a 2D CFD solver has been used to optimize the shape of a leading edge slat with a chord length of 30% of the main airfoil which was 40% thick. The airfoil configuration was subsequently tested in a wind tunnel and compared to numerical predictions. The multi-element airfoil was predicted to achieve a Cl−max of 3.1 based on the main airfoil chord length, which was confirmed in the wind tunnel campaign. Using wake rake traversal and wool tuft flow visualization wall interference effects were investigated, which were found to be a source of considerable uncertainty when measuring on thick airfoils.

A 3D methodology to quantify the effect of forests on the mean wind flow field is presented. The methodology is based on the treatment of forest raw data of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scans, and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method based on a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RaNS) approach using the k−e turbulence model with a corresponding canopy model. The example site investigated is a forest edge located on the Falster island in Denmark, where a measurement campaign was conducted. The LiDAR scans are used in order to obtain the forest heights, which served as input to the numerical CFD model. A sensitivity analysis with regards to the resolution of the structured forest height grid obtained from the implemented digital elevation model (DEM) was carried out. CFD calculations were conducted with the forest height grid taken as input and the complete methodology results are finally briefly compared to the wind measurements of the site with regards to the calculated wind field prediction accuracy.

A detailed study of the device angle dependency of a single vortex generator (VG) is presented in this paper. A single Vortex Generator on a test section wall case, with four different positions of the device angle to the incoming flow, has been designed and solved by computational methods. The computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations have been com-pared with a wind tunnel experiment, where the corresponding parametric study was per-formed over a single vane mounted on the test section wall in low-speed wind tunnel. In this experiment the flow was recorded using Stereoscopic Particle Image Velocimetry (S-PIV) in cross-planes at various positions downstream of the vane. The main goal of this article is to study the angle dependency of a single VG mounted on a test section wall; for this purpose CFD simulations have been carried out and compared with a wind tunnel experiment and an analytical model.

The present work addresses the problem of establishing the necessary grid resolution to obtain a given level of numerical accuracy using a CFD model for prediction of flow over terrain. It is illustrated, that a very high resolution may be needed if the numerical difference between consecutive refinements should be of the order of one percent for all flow directions. For the present terrain case, resolution in the order of 1 billion grid points is needed.

Various research projects have focused on active aerodynamic load control of wind turbines using control devices on the blades, for example flaps. The aerodynamic load predictions of utilized aeroelastic codes have not yet been fully validated with full rotor CFD or experimental results. In this study, a comparison between aerodynamic predictions of the aeroelastic code HAWC2 and the Navier-Stokes code EllipSys3D for the NREL 5MW reference wind turbine rotor in a stiff configuration equipped with a deformable trailing edge flap is performed. A case where the half rotor plane experiences an inflow resembling the wake from an upstream wind turbine is investigated, which is appropriate for comparing the predictions of the two codes related to the abrupt aerodynamic response and the influence of the controllable flap. The trailing edge flap is actuated to alleviate the added loads from a non-uniform inflow mimicking a half-wake situation, using different control methods and maximum flap angles. Three different control inputs are simulated: a prescribed flap angle based on the a priori knowledge of the inflow velocity, a controller based on the blade root flap-wise moment feedback, and finally a controller based on a Pitot tube velocity feedback measured at flap mid-span. Good agreement is found between EllipSys3D and HAWC2 in the prediction of the dynamic blade loads, considering the high complexity of the flow case.

Bolund measurements were used for a blind comparison of microscale flow models. Fifty-seven models ranging from numerical to physical were used, including large-eddy simulation (LES) models, Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) models, and linearized models, in addition to wind-tunnel and water-channel experiments. Many assumptions of linearized models were violated when simulating the flow around Bolund. As expected, these models showed large errors. Expectations were higher for LES models. However, of the submitted LES results, all had difficulties in applying the specified boundary conditions and all had large speed-up errors. In contrast, the physical models both managed to apply undisturbed ‘free wind’ boundary conditions and achieve good speed-up results. The most successful models were RANS with two-equation closures. These models gave the lowest errors with respect to speed-up and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) prediction.

In large‐eddy simulations, the inflow velocity field should contain resolved turbulence. This paper describes and analyzes two methods for imposing resolved turbulence in the interior of the domain in Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations. The intended application of the methods is to impose resolved turbulence immediately upstream of the region or structure of interest. Comparing to the alternative of imposing the turbulence at the inlet, there is a large potential to reduce the computational cost of the simulation by reducing the total number of cells. The reduction comes from a lower demand for mesh resolution in the upstream part of the domain. The first method uses a modification of the source terms in the discrete Navier‐Stokes equations. In the second method, an actuator is used to impose the turbulence. The methods are tested, and the most accurate is shown to be the approach of modifying the source terms. None of the two methods can impose synthetic turbulence with good results, but it is shown that by running the turbulence field through a short precursor simulation, very good results are obtained. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The wake behind a wind turbine model is investigated using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and results are compared with measurements. The turbine investigated is the three‐bladed test rotor (D = 4.5 m) used in the Model Experiments in Controlled Conditions (MEXICO) wind tunnel experiment. During the MEXICO experiment, particle image velocimetry measurements of the induction upstream and downstream of the rotor were performed for different operating conditions, giving a unique dataset to verify theoretical models and CFD models. The present paper first describes the efforts in reproducing the experimental results using the Reynold‐Averaged Navier‐Stokes method. Second, three‐dimensional airfoil characteristics are extracted that allow simulations with simpler wake models. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this work, a 2D aero‐servo‐elastic model of an airfoil section with 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) based on the 2D CFD solver EllipSys2D to calculate the aerodynamic forces is utilized to calculate the load reduction potential of an airfoil equipped with an adaptive trailing edge flap (ATEF) and subjected to a turbulent inflow signal. The employed airfoil model corresponds to a successfully tested prototype airfoil where piezoelectric actuators were used for the flapping. In the present investigation two possible control methods for the flap are compared in their ability to reduce the fluctuating normal forces on the airfoil due to a 4 s turbulent inflow signal and the best location of the measurement point for the respective control input is determined. While Control 1 uses the measurements of a Pitot tube mounted in front of the leading edge (LE) as input, Control 2 uses the pressure difference between the pressure and suction side of the airfoil measured at a certain chord position. Control 1 achieves its maximum load reduction of RStd(Fy) = 76.7% for the shortest Pitot tube of the test, i.e. a Pitot tube with a length of 0.05% of the chord length. Control 2 shows the highest load reduction of RStd(Fy) = 77.7% when the pressure difference is measured at a chord position of approximately 15%. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A three-dimensional Navier–Stokes solver has been used to investigate the flow in the nacelle region of a wind turbine where anemometers are typically placed to measure the flow speed and the turbine yaw angle. A 500 kW turbine was modelled with rotor and nacelle geometry in order to capture the complex separated flow in the blade root region of the rotor. A number of steady state and unsteady simulations were carried out for wind speeds ranging from 6 m s−1 to 16 m s−1 as well as two yaw and tilt angles. The flow in the nacelle region was found to be highly unsteady, dominated by unsteady vortex shedding from the cylindrical part of the blades, which interacted with the root vortices from each blade, generating high-velocity gradients. As a consequence, the nacelle wind speed and the nacelle flow angle were found to vary significantly with the height above the nacelle surface. The nacelle anemometry showed significant dependence on both yaw and tilt angles with yaw errors of up to 10 degrees when operating in a tilted inflow. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of the wind in complex terrain is limited by computational cost. The number of computational grid points required to resolve the near-ground turbulent structures (eddies) are very high. The traditional solution to the problem has been to apply a wall function that accounts for the whole near-wall region. Recently, a hybrid method was proposed in which the eddies close to the ground were modelled in a Reynolds-averaged sense (RANS) and the eddies above this region were simulated using LES. The advantage of the approach is the ability to use shallow cells of high aspect ratio in the RANS layer and thereby resolve the mean near-wall velocity profile. The method is applicable to complex terrain and the benefits of traditional LES are kept intact. Using the hybrid method, simulations of the wind over a natural complex terrain near Wellington in New Zealand are demonstrated. Under certain conditions, unsteady flow features have been measured at the site—flow features that could lead to high structural loads on a planned wind farm. These transient flow phenomena are reproduced with the new method. Additionally, the results from the hybrid method are compared with RANS results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The present article describes the application of the correlation based transition model of Menter et al. in combination with the Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) methodology to two cases with large degree of flow separation typically considered difficult to compute. Firstly, the flow is computed over a circular cylinder from Re = 10 to 1 × 106 reproducing the cylinder drag crisis. The computations show good quantitative and qualitative agreement with the behaviour seen in experiments. This case shows that the methodology performs smoothly from the laminar cases at low Re to the turbulent cases at high Re. Secondly, the flow is computed over a thick airfoil at high angle of attack, in this case the DU-96-W351 is considered. These computations show that a transition model is needed to obtain correct drag predictions at low angle of attack, and that the combination of transition and the DES method improve agreement in the deep stall region. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A prototype spinner anemometer was developed from a standard scientific sonic anemometer with specially designed 1D sonic sensors. A model spinner anemometer was tested in wind tunnel with two sensor head configurations. The tests showed that the sonic sensors responded with a high influence factor on yaw errors, and that the sensors responded with sinusoidal behaviour to rotation of the spinner. The tests also revealed a significant "sensor head flow distortion effect" from the classic sensor heads. A full CFD analysis of the model spinner anemometer was made. The results showed that the calculations were almost insensitive to rotation and to wind speeds. For all flow angles up to 60º the azimuth variation was a pure sinus. The shape of the responses was found to be described with a simple function that over one revolution decreases the average value with a cosine to the flow angle and increases the amplitude with a sine to the flow angle. The relation can be used in a conversion algorithm for the spinner anemometer. Field measurements were made with the model spinner anemometer. The spinner anemometer measurements were compared to measurements from a standard 3D sonic anemometer. The results showed time traces of the two instruments that were very similar. The prototype spinner anemometer was mounted on a 3.6MW prototype wind turbine. Statistics of the yaw error showed an average of about 10°. The average flow inclination angle was about 1°. The spinner anemometer measurements were correlated with wind speed and wind direction from a free meteorology mast. The results showed that the gain factor of the yaw error was only 0.80, which indicates that the yaw error measurements were overestimated with the use of the K factors from the CFD analysis. The wind speed at the free mast ahead of the wind turbine was compared to the wind speed measured by the spinner anemometer while the wind turbine was yawing while idling or stopped. The results showed that average wind spe