Baseline Mexico rotor CFD simulations with SU2 and OpenFOAM
report
Numerical results for the 4.5 meter diameter wind tunnel tested Mexico rotor have been successfully established with two in-house CFD solvers (SU2 and OpenFoam) using a constant but relatively coarse grid. Still the simulations heavily suffered from limited computation power, in particular for SU2 which could not be parallelised efficiently and hence had a much longer calculation time than OpenFoam. However, the flow field and the blade pressures are resolved better by SU2. This work is part of an ongoing effort to establish a CFD tool for wind turbine rotor modeling within ECN part of TNO, and the aim of this initial investigation is to assess the capability of in-house CFD tools by comparing these first results to the measurements from the (New) Mexico rotor database. It is important to note that one should not draw any conclusions based on the presented results and it only serves as a general comparison of the initial effort to establish numerical results from both solvers. A grid independent solution from both solvers is required to establish a tangible conclusion on the solvers. Nevertheless, based on this initial results to date, SU2’s compressible solver appears to be a versatile tool for wind energy applications.
TNO Identifier
858088
Publisher
TNO
Collation
37 p.
Place of publication
Petten