High Fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics Assessment of Wind Tunnel Turbine Test

Abstract

We present, what to our best knowledge, is the most accurate numerical investigation of the wind tunnel tests carried out over a model wind turbine (known as NTNU Blind Test) at the Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology. We show numerical benchmarking of wake measurements against experimental data and similar investigations performed previously by researchers using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. We have made a full 3D model of the wind turbine and used Sliding Mesh Interface (SMI) approach to handling the rotation of the rotor. The simulations are done with the use of OpenFoam and the k — ω Shear Stress Transport model to resolve turbulence using the Reynolds Average Navier-Strokes (RANS) technique. We present the numerically simulated spatial distribution of the flow field across the wake at zero angles of yaw for horizontal lines downstream of the rotor plane as that was the focus of the NTNU Blind Test presented in [1]