COMPRESSIBLE REYNOLDS-AVERAGED NAVIER-STOKES ANALYSIS OF WIND TURBINE TURBULENT FLOWS USING A FULLY COUPLED LOW-SPEED PRECONDITIONED MULTIGRID SOLVER

The high-fidelity aeromechanical analysis and design of multi-megawatt horizontal axis wind turbines can be performed by means of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes codes. The compressible or incompressible formulation of the fluid equations can be used. One of the objectives of the paper is to quantify the effects of flow compressibility on the aerodynamics of large turbine rotors with particular attention to the tip region of a 82 m rotor blade featuring a relative Mach number of about 0.3 near rated conditions. Noticeable local static pressure variations due to compressibility are observed. Such variations point to the better suitability of compressible solvers for turbine aerodynamics, not only when the solver is used for direct aeroacoustic simulation of the near field noise propagation, but also when it is used to provide the surface static pressure to be used as input for acoustic analogy noise propagation codes. On the numerical side, a novel numerical approach to low-speed preconditioning of the mean flow and turbulence model equations for the fully coupled integration of the flow equations coupled to a two-equation turbulence model is presented and implemented in a compressible Navier-Stokes research code for the steady and yawed wind-induced time-dependent flows analyzed herein.