Numerical Simulation of Unsteady Wind Turbine Behavior Using a Hybrid Model

Ivan Dobrev*, Fawaz Massouh ENSAM, 75013, Paris, France and Marc Rapin ONERA, BP 72, 92322 Chtillon Cedex, France

Nomenclature
c Cn Ct p r R WR = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = blade chord normal force coefficient tangential force coefficient pressure radial distance blade radius reference relative velocity angle of attack blade pitch angle inflow flow angle with reference to plane of rotation mass matrix damping matrix stiffness matrix nodal displacement vector load vector fluid state vector amplitude decay factor

M C K {u} F(t) W

I.

Introduction

IND turbines operate in a severe environment where wind changes its velocity and direction at each moment. Consequently, the aerodynamic forces are variable during the blade rotation and thus failures due to fatigue are frequent. To evaluate these forces there is need of numerical codes, which are able to compute the aerodynamic properties of elastic blade structure. To obtain numerical results about blade aerodynamics loads with sufficient quality, a RANS simulation with an appropriate fine grid mesh in the computational domain is needed. However it is very difficult to obtain these results in the case of extreme winds and gusts modeling. Here, a 10-second period of flow time is needed, but time step usually corresponds to blade step of few degrees. Thus to simulate an extreme wind gust a minimum of 10 000 time steps is need. This is not very practical and as consequences simplified models based on blade element method (BEM) or vortex methods are used. To account fluid-structure interactions these codes are generally coupled with structural dynamics methods based on beams dynamics. The models based on BEM and linear vortex wake methods are simple to use but are limited to simple boundary conditions. The nonlinear unsteady methods so called free-wake models are robust and give good results in very complex environment. Habitually the authors, who used the vortex methods, stated that a RANS method suffers from various numerical difficulties such as excessive diffusion, adequate turbulence modeling, etc. It is clear that in
*

Ph.D. student, ENSAM, 151, Bd de LHpital, Paris, 75013, France, Ivan.Dobrev8@etudiants.ensam.fr. Professor, ENSAM, Bd de LHpital, Paris, 75013, France, Fawaz.Massouh@paris.ensam.fr. Research Engineer, ONERA, BP 72, 92322 Chtillon Cedex, France, Marc.Rapin@onera.fr 1 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

the case of vortex methods the wake modeling is very important, but in the case of wind turbine this wake is influenced also by viscous effects, because the rotor operates very close to the ground surface. However, the vortex methods are non-viscous. To overcome the difficulties related to time limitation in the case of RANS or viscous interaction in the case of free-wake vortex methods the so-called hybrid modeling1 is applied. As results the calculation time is acceptable and viscous interaction is taken into account. Here, the model1 developed by the authors replaces and presents the blades as surfaces of pressure discontinuity. This presentation is equivalent to a lifting surface in terms of vortex modeling, but here the induced velocities are calculated using a RANS solver. Also like in case of lifting line or BEM methods the calculated blade forces are based on the angle of attack and dynamic pressure upstream the blade. Thus the airfoils lift and drag coefficients are needed. In this investigation the hybrid model is applied in the case of wind turbine in yaw. To account for fluid-structure interaction the aerodynamic modeling is coupled with a structural dynamics code. The coupling method is based on an improved serial staggered scheme.

II.

Proposed aeroelastic model

A. Aerodynamic modeling This model couples the BEM and RANS solver. In the domain of CFD computation the rotor geometry is simplified and the blades are replaced by surfaces with the boundary condition pressure discontinuity. Hence, the surface forces replace the rigid blade wall and the number of nodes is reduced significantly because there is no need to model the boundary layer. Starting from upstream flow, blade geometry and airfoil data the BEM module calculates the pressure distribution on the surface replacing the blade. Then the CFD module computes the flow velocity field using as boundary condition the pressure distribution obtained from the BEM module. The solution at each time step is carried out using an iterative method, exchanging data between the BEM and CFD modules; it stops after convergence or when a specified maximum number of iterations per time step are reached. Here the calculation of pressure discontinuity is based on the blade element approach. At the blade radius r, the elementary forces acting in the normal and tangential directions on a blade element with span dr and chord c are:
1 2 WR (r)c(r)Cn ( )dr, 2 1 2 dFt (r) = WR (r)c(r) Ct ( )dr, 2 dFn (r) =

(1)

where

= . Here, we use the rotational airfoil characteristics Cn=Cn (,r/R) and Ct=Ct (,r/R) and a local inflow flow angle determined in RANS module. In the case of even distribution of the normal force on the surface dS = cdr the pressure is 2 dF 1/ 2 WR (r)c(r) Cn (r)dr 1 2 p= n = = WR (r) Cn (r) . (2) dS cdr 2 Then this constant pressure is applied like a pressure discontinuity along the chord, which replaces the airfoil. The hybrid model proposed here is based on the CFD code Fluent. The employed turbulence model is the k- SST and the pressure-velocity coupling is based on the SIMPLE algorithm. The unsteady solution of the momentum equations is obtained by means of a second order upwind differencing scheme. In the discrete geometrical model, which represents flow field around the wind turbine, the blades are replaced by surfaces respecting the fan boundary condition. This boundary condition corresponds to an imposed pressure difference between adjacent cells, located at the opposite sides of the boundary. Once at the beginning of each iteration the CFD code executes a userdefined User Defined Function (UDF) in C language that plays the role of the BEM solver. The time step used corresponds to time for the blade to carry out an angular step equal to 2. The UDF has access to all grid, face and cell flow variables, which are needed to calculate the inflow angles. Consequently, the normal and tangential force coefficients for each blade section are calculated from blade geometry and interpolated experimental data. Then the resulting pressures from Eq.(2), are imposed on the blade

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equivalent surfaces. The solution for one time step is obtained after nearly 10 iterations depending of the number of nodes, demanded residuals, etc. At the end of each fluid time step, the blade surface is divided in several strips and the axial and the radial forces are computed for each of them by integrating the static pressure. Later the obtained strip forces are exported in the structural dynamic solver and used to compute blade motion. At the beginning of each time step, the displacement of blade boundary nodes is obtained by using the coordinates of the elastic line position and torsion (blade is modeled as the beam). To simplify the computing of the new nodes positions, we suppose that blade section is nondeformable and that its movement is always planar. B. Structural transient dynamic analysis In the dynamic analysis the code ANSYS is used to determine the dynamic response of a blade structure under the action of a time-dependent aerodynamic load. This analysis enables to determine the time-varying displacements, stresses, and inertial forces in a blade structure as it responds to any combination of static, transient, and harmonic loads. The time scale of the loading is such that the inertia or damping effects are considered to be important. Here the basic equation of motion to be solved is: d2u du M 2 + C + K {u} = F(t) . dt dt The ANSYS code uses an improved version of the Newmark time integration method to solve this equation at any one of the integration time steps. The Newmark method is unconditionally stable when 0. Usually the amplitude decay factor is small; here we use value of 0.005 for . The full solution method solves the basic equation of motion directly and makes no additional assumptions, but the Coriolis forces are not accounted for. Because of presence of centrifugal forces due to the blade rotation the transient problem is nonlinear and the Newton-Raphson method is employed to take into account the interaction between the blade flapping and the centrifugal forces. For testing purposes only one internal solver is programmed as UDF. This simple module uses the mode shapes and frequencies calculated by an external eigen-solver. C. Coupling between CFD and CSD The method applied here is based on a staggered algorithm2 proposed by Farhat and Lesoinne and called Improved Serial Staggered (ISS) procedure, fig. 1. This method is capable to compute highly accurate aeroelastic solutions using coupling time-steps, which are comparable to those afforded by strongly coupled solution methods. The ISS procedure is applies as follows, Fig. 1 0. For given initial conditions for fluid state vector and structure state vector the fluid dynamic mesh motion is initialized for the pressure surfaces (blades) du x 1/ 2 = {u}0 1 2 t . dt 0 Fig. 1 Serial staggered method 1. For the next time steps, when n 1, the boundary mesh in fluid analysis is as follows dx du = , dt n dt n du {x}n +1/ 2 = {u}n 1/ 2 1 2 t . dt n 2. Fluid state vector {W} is obtained in flow time step n+ 3. Fluid pressure is converted in equivalent forces applied in corresponding nodes for the structural analysis 4. Boundary mesh in fluid solver advanced, point 1 is repeated using a second-order time-accurate midpoint rule.

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III.

Numerical simulations

The studied wind turbine is the two-bladed NREL3 Phase VI rotor of 10-meter diameter and blade sections correspond to the S809 airfoil. The choice of NREL wind turbine was made because it currently constitutes a reference for many research applications in wind turbine aerodynamics due to its large experimental database. Thus, it is very useful to validate the proposed model using the available inflow measurements at five blade radii for different upstream velocities. The studied case in the present work is for upwind rotor in steady yaw of 30, the blade tip pitch is 3 degrees and average section Reynolds number is about 1.106. The upstream wind velocity is 12 m/s. A parallelepiped with the size of the NASA Ames wind tunnel represents the flow field around the wind turbine rotor. Hence, experiments and numerical simulations have the same blockage. The rotor is modeled as a cylinder with 12 m of diameter and 1m of length. At each time the cylinder rotates about the rotor axis using the Fluent moving mesh capability. The surface corresponding to the blade is represented by 3000 Fig.2 Coupling scheme Fluent/Ansys nodes from the 200 000 ones used for the whole model. This surface is divided in the chordwise direction into 30 intervals, which are refined near the leading edge, where the pressure discontinuity is strongest. In spanwise direction the blade is divided into 60 intervals equally spaced. The initial cells size in normal direction is 0.01 chords and the growth factor of 1.5 is used. At the end of each flow time step the blade pressure is calculated and exported in ANSYS. Here, the blade motion for one time step is calculated, using as initial conditions the nodal displacement and the nodal velocities obtained in previous time step. Then in the beginning of the flow time step the blade surface is updated applying dynamic mesh capability of the Fluent code. This Fig. 3 Aerodynamic torque (For example) computation procedure is applied at each time step and the repeatability of results is obtained after two rotor turns. Then the variations of aerodynamic and mechanical results in function of azimuthal angles become periodic with a period of one turn. Consequently it is possible to save the needed aerodynamic and structure results as functions of azimuthal angle. These results are compared with the NREL data such as th variation of torque shown on Fig.3.

References
F. Massouh, I. Dobrev and M. Rapin, Numerical Simulation of Wind Turbine Performance Using a Hybrid Model, 44th AIAA Aerospace Science Meeting and Exhibit, Reno, Nevada, January 2006 2 C. Farhat, M. Lesoinne, Two efficient staggered algorithms for the serial and parallel solution of three-dimensional nonlinear transient aeroelastic problems, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 182 (2000), pp.499-515. 3 Hand M., Simms D., Fingersh L.J. et al. Unsteady Aerodynamics Experiment Phase VI: Wind Tunnel Test Configurations and Available Data Campaigns, NREL/TP-500-29955, December 2001
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