Vertical Axis Wind Turbine
 

Hi,
my company wishes to do some CFD simulations on a Vertical Axis wind turbine.

We've always used SolidWorks Flow Simulation. As soon as you have an horizontal axis wind turbine the mixing plane approach used by SolidWorks Flow simulation is ok.

If you have a vertical axis wind turbine it won't work.

Our aim is determing at what angular velocity will the turbine speed when it's being hit by wind at a certain speed.

We had a look at ABAQUS CFD but we were told that the model it uses can work only in the initial phase, when the flow is laminar and the turbine is begginging to move.

What CFD code can simulate vertical axis wind turbines in turbulent motion ?

Thanks,

Alex

It seems that for VAWT, fluent has been used the most. You might want to take a look at papers and dissertations and see what they use for similar things.You could even contract one of the master/phd students of recent works as they might still be looking for jobs.

For example:

• Carrigan 2011:
  http://dspace.uta.edu/bitstream/hand...pdf?sequence=1
  (Carrigan uses Fluent but mentions OpenFoam as an option)
  
• Sanyer 2011:
  http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bi...7068/1/etd.pdf
  (Analytical model and his own software to analyze wind tunnel data)
  
• Dhruv Rathi
  http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bi...8079/1/etd.pdf
  (Also analytical models with Matlab)
  
• Yan Cheng
  http://digital.library.louisville.ed...ename/4970.pdf
  (used Fluent also)
  
  

TotalSim
 

Hi Alex,

As JR22 says Fluent is more than capable of doing it.

As is OpenFOAM if you want to go down that route.

We've done similar simulations ourselves. It also depends what kind of CFD methodology, moving mesh etc.

Best of luck.

Regards

lenz 2 turbine
 

Hi guys,
I'm doing a cfd simulation of a vawt(lenz 2 type). It is for my 3rd year mech engineering college project. I have never used Anys before and was just wondering could anybody give me a starting help? I know what airfoil profile i want to use(NACA 15), and know what turbine radius is but how do i go about importing this in to ANYS and then drawing the other 2 airfoils? How do I create the mesh I'm looking for?
The ultimate aim is to find the mechanical torque available from the turbine for a given wind speed and produce a graph of CP against RPM.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regrds
Kevin