Narrow Results

Numerical simulations of flow fields around the wind turbine rotor simplified as an actuator disk (AD) with zero thickness have been made to investigate the flow structure and wake development in different operation states. A N-S solver has been used and the energy extracted by the rotor is represented by a discontinuous pressure jump through the actuator disk. Axial pressure and velocity development from far upstream to far downstream is fully described by the simulations, which could never be obtained by the momentum theory. It is showed that there are significant differences in wake development between inviscid and viscous conditions. In inviscid simulations, the axial velocity keeps decreasing along the oncoming flow direction, which is consistent with the momentum theory. In viscous simulations, however, the axial velocity first decreases but then gradually recovers approaching to the undisturbed velocity, due to momentum transport from outer flow to wake flow by viscous shear effect. Based on the numerical analysis, the work of this paper is also focused on wake modeling. A new two-dimensional models based on nonlinear wake development has been developed, which is capable to describe the far wake more accurately.

In this paper, the research on two types of unsteady flow problems in turbomachinery including blade flutter and rotor-stator interaction is made by means of numerical simulation. For the former, the energy method is often used to predict the aeroelastic stability by calculating the aerodynamic work per vibration cycle. The inter-blade phase angle (IBPA) is an important parameter in computation and may have significant effects on aeroelastic behavior. For the latter, the numbers of blades in each row are usually not equal and the unsteady rotor-stator interactions could be strong. An effective way to perform multi-row calculations is the domain scaling method (DSM). These two cases share a common point that the computational domain has to be extended to multi passages (MP) considering their respective features. The present work is aimed at modeling these two issues with the developed MP model. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique is applied to resolve the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations and simulate the flow fields. With the parallel technique, the additional time cost due to modeling more passages can be largely decreased. Results are presented on two test cases including a vibrating rotor blade and a turbine stage.