An actuator surface model to simulate vertical axis turbines

Massie, Lucy, Ouro Barba, Pablo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6411-8241, Stoesser, Thorsten and Luo, Qianyu 2019. An actuator surface model to simulate vertical axis turbines. Energies 12 (24) , 4741. 10.3390/en12244741

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Abstract

An actuator surface model (ASM) to be employed to simulate the effect of a vertical axis turbine on the hydrodynamics in its vicinity, particularly its wake is introduced. The advantage of the newly developed ASM is that it can represent the complex flow inside the vertical axis turbine’s perimeter reasonably well, and hence, is able to predict, with a satisfying degree of accuracy, the turbine’s near-wake, with a low computational cost. The ASM appears to overcome the inadequacy of actuator line models to account for the flow blockage of the rotor blades when they are on the up-stream side of the revolution, because the ASM uses a surface instead of a line to represent the blade. The ASM was used on a series of test cases to prove its validity, demonstrating that first order flow statistics—in our study, profiles of the stream-wise velocity—in the turbine’s vicinity, can be produced with reasonable accuracy. The prediction of second order statistics, here in the form of the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), exhibited dependence on the chosen grid; the finer the grid, the better the match between measured and computed TKE profiles.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff (ARCCA) Engineering
Publisher:	MDPI
ISSN:	1996-1073
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 December 2019
Date of Acceptance:	29 November 2019
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2024 14:23
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/127514

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