Higher-Order Accurate Simulations of Wind Turbine Flow Fields: A Poor Man's Approach

摘要

A higher order reconstruction approach (up to 7th order) based on WENO methodology is applied to grids typically found in wind turbine applications. The presence of an essentially structured grid to resolve the wake is exploited in this implementation. The advantage of this approach over traditional finite-volume schemes applied to unstructured meshes is that it fits within the context of existing flow solvers and can be implemented with minimal modifications. Results presented here for the BT1 configuration show overall improvements in thrust and power coefficient predictions, while significant improvement can be observed in the velocity fluctuation predictions. The current implementation requires about 35% more computational time compared to traditional quadratic reconstruction.