WIND TURBINE CFD SIMULATION

I decided to run a wind turbine simulation on OpenFOAM. This is an Arbitrary Mesh Interface setup, run using pimpleDyMFoam. The turbine stem/post has been neglected in the study, in order to ease the simulation process. Wall function was operated on a coarse mesh, which was created using the snappyHexMesh tool and the total number of cells worked up to 3,05,294.  A close eye has to be kept on the usage of the wall function while performing the grid study. Because drastically refining the cells, without creating boundary layers, can cause the Courant number to shoot up while performing the simulation.
Three cylindrical geometries were used in the mesh. A small cylinder to house the wind turbine and to form the AMI interface with the intermediate cylinder. A large cylinder to envelop the entire fluid domain.

Figure No.1: Pressure Side

Figure No.2: Suction Side

Below are some of the animations compiled from the simulation. 


Velocity distribution along the blade: (https://youtu.be/GFzQ0cOC_p4)


Turbulent kinetic Energy 'k': (https://youtu.be/ZdNqHdaypp8)


Wake velocity: (https://youtu.be/HfjQrTXBSnM)


Epsilon: (https://youtu.be/6tBgemUIjyg)

An advanced simulation, using a refined grid, can be performed for the calculation of forces and moments as per the availability of good computational resources. 

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