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Title: Analysis of the sweeped actuator line method

Journal Article · · E3S Web of Conferences
 [1];  [1];  [1];  [2]
  1. Ecole de Technologie Superieure, Montreal, QC (Canada)
  2. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

The actuator line method made it possible to describe the near wake of a wind turbine more accurately than with the actuator disk method. Whereas the actuator line generates the helicoidal vortex system shed from the tip blades, the actuator disk method sheds a vortex sheet from the edge of the rotor plane. But with the actuator line come also temporal and spatial constraints, such as the need for a much smaller time step than with actuator disk. While the latter one only has to obey the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition, the former one is also restricted by the grid resolution and the rotor tip-speed. Additionally the spatial resolution has to be finer for the actuator line than with the actuator disk, for well resolving the tip vortices. Therefore this work is dedicated to examining a method in between of actuator line and actuator disk, which is able to model the transient behavior, such as the rotating blades, but which also relaxes the temporal constraint. Therefore a larger time-step is used and the blade forces are swept over a certain area. As a result, the main focus of this article is on the aspect of the blade tip vortex generation in comparison with the standard actuator line and actuator disk.

Research Organization:
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
1352992
Report Number(s):
NREL/JA-5000-68400
Journal Information:
E3S Web of Conferences, Vol. 5; ISSN 2267-1242
Publisher:
EDP SciencesCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 2 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

References (9)

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Large-Eddy Simulation of Wind-Turbine Wakes: Evaluation of Turbine Parametrisations journal December 2010
Large eddy simulations of the flow past wind turbines: actuator line and disk modeling: LES of the flow past wind turbines: actuator line and disk modeling journal April 2014
High Resolution Schemes for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws journal August 1997
Stability analysis of the tip vortices of a wind turbine journal March 2010
A Large-Eddy Simulations of Wind-Plant Aerodynamics
  • Churchfield, Matthew; Lee, Sang; Moriarty, Patrick
  • 50th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2012-537
conference November 2012
Definition of a 5-MW Reference Wind Turbine for Offshore System Development report February 2009

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Multiscale aeroelastic simulations of large wind farms in the atmospheric boundary layer journal September 2016

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