Wall-Resolved LES Modeling of a Wind Turbine Airfoil at Different Angles of Attack

Abstract

Noise has arisen as one of the main restrictions for the deployment of wind turbines in urban environments or in sensitive ecosystems like oceans for offshore and coastal applications. An LES model, adequately planned and resolved, is useful to describe the noise generation mechanisms in wind turbine airfoils. In this work, a wall-resolved LES model of the turbulent flow around a typical wind turbine airfoil is presented and described in detail. The numerical results obtained have been validated with hot wire measurements in a wind tunnel. The description of the boundary layer over the airfoil provides an insight into the main noise generation mechanism, which is known to be the scattering of the vortical disturbances in the boundary layer into acoustic waves at the airfoil trailing edge. In the present case, 2D wave instabilities are observed in both suction and pressure sides, but these perturbations are diffused into a turbulent boundary layer prior to the airfoil trailing edge, so tonal noise components are not expected in the far-field noise propagation. The results obtained can be used as input data for the prediction of noise propagation to the far-field using a hybrid aeroacoustic model.

Efficient Prediction of Turbulent Inflow and Leading-Edge Interaction Noise Using a Vortex Particle Method with Look-up Table Approach

“…Although trailing edge noise has received more attention than leading edge noise [3,4,5,6], it is crucial to investigate leading edge noise as well. This is because all active sources must be considered to accurately predict the potential for noise reduction from mitigation measures, which primarily target trailing-edge noise as the primary source [7,8,9]. Early investigations 2 on leading edge noise have been primarily analytical in nature and based on frequency domain analysis [10,11,12,13,14].…”

CFD Modeling of Wind Turbine Blades with Eroded Leading Edge

“…Starting from experimental activities, in the early 1990s, Butterfield et al [3] and Somers and Tangler [4] made the first experiments of a wind turbine aerofoil and since then many tests have been conducted [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. On the other hand, looking at numerical approaches and thanks to the increasing availability of computing power, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) have gained popularity for simulating wind turbine aerodynamics [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. A clear survey about experimental and numerical works related to wind energy is provided by Vermeer et al [25].…”

Análisis de patrones turbulentos de un tanque agitado, utilizando dinámica de fluidos computacional y velocimetría por imágenes de partículas

“…Además de un esquema de segundo orden para la presión y un esquema de Green-Gauss basado en el nodo para el gradiente, en conjunto con el algoritmo de acoplamiento conocido como (SIMPLE) y un criterio de convergencia de 10 -5 . Las formulaciones, esquemas y algoritmos utilizados, se eligieron con base en la guía de ANSYS y en la revisión de diversas investigaciones realizadas por diferentes autores donde se utiliza esta técnica [76], [114], [124], [129]- [133].…”