CFD Design of Urban Wind Turbines: A Review and Critical Analysis

The Urban Wind Turbine (UWT) industry has experienced diverse results with some positive outcomes and various negative ones. Regarding negative outcomes, designers have often overestimated performances of UWTs. Differences of 20% or less between actual energy produced and energy originally estimated were found in literature. These differences would have been caused by an incorrect location of the UWTs. Note that determining the optimal location for UWTs is a complex task due to unforeseen wind behaviour found in urban environments. To cope with this complex task, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach is presented as a suitable alternative. Thus, this paper aimed to develop a review to introduce recent advancements in the field of CFD design of UWTs, and to perform a critical analysis of these advancements. Accordingly, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) associated with the topic was performed to obtain suitable information (primary studies) for the critical analysis. The results showed that the maximum velocity amplification factor, power coefficient and torque coefficient found in the primary studies were 1.8, 0.4627 and 0.4195, respectively. Note that these values were obtained using novel UWTs and wind amplification devices. Regarding CFD modelling, the standard k-epsilon turbulence model was the most used (42% of studies).