Campus Units

Aerospace Engineering

Document Type

Article

Publication Version

Published Version

Publication Date

7-21-2016

Journal or Book Title

Energies

Volume

9

Issue

7

First Page

571

DOI

10.3390/en9070571

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to numerically investigate the effects of the atmospheric boundary layer on the aerodynamic performance and loads of a novel dual-rotor wind turbine (DRWT). Large eddy simulations are carried out with the turbines operating in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and in a uniform inflow. Two stability conditions corresponding to neutral and slightly stable atmospheres are investigated. The turbines are modeled using the actuator line method where the rotor blades are modeled as body forces. Comparisons are drawn between the DRWT and a comparable conventional single-rotor wind turbine (SRWT) to assess changes in aerodynamic efficiency and loads, as well as wake mixing and momentum and kinetic energy entrainment into the turbine wake layer. The results show that the DRWT improves isolated turbine aerodynamic performance by about 5%–6%. The DRWT also enhances turbulent axial momentum entrainment by about 3.3" role="presentation" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; text-align: left; word-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; position: relative;">3.3 %. The highest entrainment is observed in the neutral stability case when the turbulence in the ABL is moderately high. Aerodynamic loads for the DRWT, measured as out-of-plane blade root bending moment, are marginally reduced. Spectral analyses of ABL cases show peaks in unsteady loads at the rotor passing frequency and its harmonics for both rotors of the DRWT.

Comments

This article is from Energies 2016, 9(7), 571; doi:10.3390/en9070571. Posted with permission.

Rights

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Copyright Owner

The authors

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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