Applying the Body Force Method to the Simulation of Flow around a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine

• Main Authors: I-Hui Tseng, 曾益慧
• Other Authors: Ching-Yeh Hsin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54222278979488986300

碩士 === 國立臺灣海洋大學 === 系統工程暨造船學系 === 100 === Wind energy is one of the cleanest energy in the world, and increasingly important in renewable energy. The computational methods of wind turbines, such as blade element momentum method and viscous flow RANS method, have been extensively used recently. In this thesis, the body force method has been implemented by using the blade element momentum method to compute the body forces representing the blade loadings, and then using the actuator disk model to simulate the flow around a horizontal axis wind turbine. The computational results show that the present method can give a good prediction of a single turbine comparing to those of the real geometry computed by RANS. The computational results of turbine arrays show that the power generated by the turbine downstream decreases due to the velocity loss, and this loss decreases as the distance between two turbines increases. It is found that the velocity loss reduced to near 10% as the distance is 8 times of diameters. In addition, the computational results also show that the wake length of the last turbine in an array increases as the number of turbines increases. Although the computational results have not compared to the experimental data yet, the results agree with the literatures have found. The computational results prove that the present method is efficient and is able to give the correct qualitative predictions of the interactions among turbines in an array. More physics should be put into consideration to improve the quantitative accuracy of this method in the future, hence it can be applied to the design of wind farm layout.