VERTICAL AXIS WIND TURBINE WAKE FLOW ASSESSMENT USING OPENFOAM

Resumo

Wind power is one of the means of producing renewable energy that has grown in popularity due
to the horizontal axis wind turbine great efficiency. However, vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are
becoming an interesting option in urban environments. As it is well known, the wake flow generated
by the kinetic energy extraction of the wind turbine blades has a direct influence on the wind turbine
performance, whether isolated or grouped in a wind farm. This work presents a computational fluid
dynamics (CFD) study of a Darrieus VAWT wake flow. The wind turbine is assumed to be located inside
a boundary-layer wind tunnel with different inflow conditions. The complete coupling between the
rotating rigid solid and the fuid flow is implemented by open source CFD OpenFOAM software. Three
dimensional unsteady flow simulations are carried out by means of the Unsteady Reynolds Averaged
Navier-Stokes (URANS) method and using the sliding mesh technique in order to explicity resolved the
turbine rotation. The obtained results are compared with previous experimental work, showing a good
agreement.