Search

Within an international collaboration framework, the accuracy of rotor aerodynamic models used for design load calculations of wind turbines is being assessed. Where the use of high-fidelity computation fluid dynamics (CFD) and mid-fidelity free-vortex wake (FVW) models has become commonplace within the wind energy community, these still fail to meet the requirements in terms of execution time and computational cost needed for design load calculations. The fast but engineering fidelity blade-element/momentum (BEM) method can therefore still be considered the industry workhorse for design load simulations. At the same time, upscaling of wind turbine rotors makes inflow non-uniformities (e.g. shear, veer, turbulence) more important. The objective of this work is to assess model accuracy in non-uniform inflow conditions, which violate several BEM assumptions. Thereto a comparison in turbulent inflow has been executed including a wide variety of codes, focusing on the DanAero field measurements, where a 2.3-MW turbine was equipped with, among other sensors, a pressure measurement apparatus. The results indicate that, although average load patterns are in good agreement, this does not hold for the unsteady loads that drive fatigue damage and aero-elastic stability. A simplified comparison round in vertical shear was initiated to investigate the observed differences in a more controlled manner. A consistent offset in load amplitude was observed between CFD and free-vortex codes on the one hand and BEM-type codes on the other hand. To shed more light on the observations, dedicated efforts are ongoing to pinpoint the cause for these differences, in the end leading to guidelines for an improved BEM implementation.

The increase in the number of installed offshore wind farms has led to clustering, where wind farm interaction can cause energy losses. The Danish government is planning an Energy Island in the North Sea consisting of ten 1 GW wind farms. The initial wind farm layout design from a consultant company (COWI) has reported a 5% annual energy production (AEP) wake loss based on a low-fidelity engineering wake model that is known to underestimate wind farm interaction. The present work employs higher-fidelity wake models based on Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and a mesoscale model, which predict higher AEP losses due to wind farm interaction; namely, between 8.6-10.1%. In addition, we investigate how a microscale model as RANS can be employed to simulate a large wind farm cluster efficiently, and we compare its results with mesoscale model simulations.

Offshore wind farms are more commonly installed in wind farm clusters, where wind farm interaction can lead to energy losses; hence, there is a need for numerical models that can properly simulate wind farm interaction. This work proposes a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) method to efficiently simulate the effect of neighboring wind farms on wind farm power and annual energy production. First, a novel steady-state atmospheric inflow is proposed. This inflow model is well suited for RANS simulations of large wind farms because it does not lead to the development of nonphysical wind farm wakes. Second, a RANS-based wind farm parametrization is introduced, the actuator wind farm (AWF) model, which represents the wind farm as a forest canopy and allows to use of coarser grids compared to modeling all wind turbines as actuator disks (ADs). When the horizontal resolution of the RANS-AWF model is increased, the model results approach the results of the RANS-AD model. A double wind farm case is simulated with RANS to show that replacing an upstream wind farm with an AWF model only causes a deviation less than 1 % in terms of wind farm power of the downstream wind farm. Most importantly, a reduction in CPU hours of 74.4 % is achieved, provided that the AWF inputs are known, namely, wind farm thrust and power coefficients. The reduction in CPU hours is further reduced when all wind farms are represented by AWF models; namely 89.3 % and 99.9 %, for the double wind farm case and for a wind farm cluster case consisting of three wind farms, respectively. For the double wind farm case, the RANS models predict different wind speed flow fields compared to output from simulations performed with the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF), but the models are in agreement with the inflow wind speed of the downstream wind farm. The double wind farm case is also simulated with the TurbOPark engineering wake model. Similar wake shapes are reproduced by TurbOPark but

We present a formalism for dissipation-optimized decomposition of the strain rate tensor (SRT) of turbulent flow data using Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD). The formalism includes a novel inverse spectral SRT operator allowing the mapping of the resulting SRT modes to corresponding velocity fields, which enables a complete dissipationoptimized reconstruction of the velocity field. Flow data snapshots are obtained from a direct numerical simulation of a turbulent channel flow with friction Reynolds number Ret = 390. The lowest dissipation-optimized POD (d-POD) modes are compared to the lowest conventional turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) optimized POD (e-POD) modes. The lowest d-POD modes show a richer small-scale structure, along with traces of the large-scale structure characteristic of e-POD modes, indicating that the former capture structures across a wider range of spatial scales. Profiles of both TKE and dissipation are reconstructed using both decompositions, and reconstruction convergences are compared in all cases. Both TKE and dissipation are reconstructed more efficiently in the dissipation-rich near-wall region using d-POD modes, and in the TKE-rich bulk using e-POD modes. Lower modes of either decomposition tend to contribute more to either reconstructed quantity. Separating each term into eigenvalues and factors relating to the inherent structures in each mode reveals that higher e-POD modes tend to encode more dissipative structures, whereas the structures encoded by d-POD modes have roughly constant inherent TKE content, supporting the hypothesis that structures encoded by d-POD modes tend to span a wide range of spatial scales.

The present investigation used numerical simulations to study the vibrations of a wind turbine blade in standstill. Such vibrations are presumed to affect horizontal axis wind turbine designs and can jeopardize the structural integrity of the machine. The applied numerical methods relied on a fluid–structure interaction (FSI) approach, coupling a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver with a multibody finite-element structural solver. A 96-m-long wind turbine blade was studied for a large parametric space, accounting for the variation of both pitch and inclination. The inclination was defined as the angle between the freestream velocity and the cross-sectional plane at the root, allowing for the introduction of a flow component in the spanwise direction. The pitch variation corresponded to the rotation of the inflow around the spanwise axis, steering the angles of attack seen by the airfoils. Two regimes of vibrations were characterized, depending on the considered range of the inclination angle. For high inclinations, the pitch angles leading to vibrations clustered around a particular region of the parametric space, and the appearance of large oscillations was accompanied by the synchronization of the loading with the frequency of motion. At low inclination angles, the mechanism triggering vibrations was relatively similar, even if the excitation spectrum was richer, and the critical pitch angles seemed to be more scattered. Regardless of the inflow, the problem was highly three-dimensional, and several complex flow phenomena such as oblique shedding and phase dislocations were identified.

In this study, vortex-induced vibrations (VIVs) on the IEA 10 MW blade are investigated using two methodologies in order to assess strengths and weaknesses of the two simulation types. Both fully coupled fluid–structure interaction (FSI) simulations and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with forced motion of the blade are used and compared. It is found that for the studied cases with high inclination angles, the forced-motion simulations succeed in capturing the power injection by the aerodynamics, despite the motion being simplified. From the fully coupled simulations, a dependency on initial conditions of the vibrations was found, showing that cases which are stable if unperturbed might go into large VIVs if provoked initially by, for instance, inflow turbulence or turbine operations. Depending on the initial vibration amplitudes, multiple limit cycle levels can be triggered, for the same flow case, due to the non-linearity of the aerodynamics. By fitting a simple damping model for the specific blade and mode shape from FSI simulations, it is also demonstrated that the equilibrium limit cycle amplitudes between power injection and dissipation can be estimated using forced-motion simulations, even for the multiple stable vibration cases, with good agreement with fully coupled simulations. Finally, a time series generation from forced-motion simulations and the simple damping model is presented, concluding that CFD amplitude sweeps can estimate not only the final limit cycle oscillation amplitude, but also the vibration build-up time series.

This work aims to develop a simple framework for transition prediction over wind-turbine blades, including effects of the blade rotation and spanwise velocity without requiring fully three-dimensional simulations. The framework is based on a set of boundary-layer equations (BLEs) and parabolized stability equations (PSEs), including rotation effects. An important element of the developed BL method is the modeling of the spanwise velocity at the boundary-layer edge. The two analyzed wind-turbine geometries correspond to a constant airfoil and the DTU 10-MW Reference Wind Turbine blades. The BL model allows an accurate prediction of thechordwise velocity profiles. Further, for regions not too close to the stagnation point and root of the blade, profiles of the spanwise velocity agree with those from Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations.The model also allows predicting inflectional velocity profiles for lower radial positions, which may allow cross-flow transition. Transition prediction is performed at several radial positions through an “envelope-of-envelopes” methodology. The results are compared with the eN method of Drela and Giles, implemented in the EllipSys3D RANS code. The RANS transition locations closely agree with those from the PSE analysis of a 2D mean flow without rotation. These results also agree with those from the developed model for cases with low 3D and rota-tion effects, such as at higher radial positions and geometries with strong adverse pressure gradients where 2D Tollmien–Schlichting (TS) waves are dominant. However, the RANS and PSE 2D models predict a later transition in the regions where 3D and rotation effects are non-negligible. The developed method, which accounts for these effects, predicted earlier transition onsets in this region (e.g., 19 % earlier than RANS at 26 % of theradius for the constant-airfoil geometry) and shows that transition may occur via highly oblique modes. These modes differ from 2D TS waves and appear, QC 20230926

Large eddy simulations of wind farms are often performed with canonical atmospheric conditions, where the background flow is based on precursor simulations with idealized model setups yielding statistically stationary turbulent flows. However, precursor simulations can only handle gradually changing flow conditions, and are not capable of modelling highly transient and statistically non-stationary flows, e.g. frontal passages or large gusts. Such flows frequently occur in nature, and can influence the operation—and potentially design—of wind turbines. It is generally not possible to impose non-stationary features through inlet boundary conditions, if the imposed flow violates the most fundamental assumption of micro-scale flow simulations, namely conservation of mass. This work presents a method for modelling highly transient wind speed ramps by extending and adapting the method of applying body forces to achieve specific flow scenarios, where the wind speed ramps are embedded as constrained turbulent boxes. Several scenarios with significant increases in the streamwise wind speed are simulated. Analyses of the transient wake dynamics, as the wind speed ramps propagate through large wind farms are performed to show how well the momentum is maintained throughout the numerical domain and the influence and operation of turbines during the ramp passages.

The present investigation used numerical simulations to study the vortex induced vibrations (VIVs) of a 96 m long wind turbine blade. The results of this baseline shape were compared with four additional geometry variants featuring different tip extensions. The geometry of the tip extensions was generated through the variation of two design parameters: the dihedral angle bending the blade out of the rotor plane and the sweep angle bending the blade in the rotor plane. The applied numerical methods relied on a fluid structure interaction (FSI) approach, coupling a computational fluid dynamics solver with a multi-body structural solver. The methodology followed for locating VIV regions was based on the variation of the inclination angle. This variable was defined as the angle between the freestream velocity and the blade axis, being 0° when these vectors were normal and positive when a velocity component from tip to root was introduced. For the baseline geometry, the FSI simulations predicted significant blade vibrations for inclination angles between 47.5° and 60° with a maximum peak-to-peak amplitude of 2.3 m. The installation of the different tip extensions on the blade geometry was found to significantly modify the inclination angles where VIV was observed. In particular, the simulations of three of the tip designs showed a shifting of several degrees for the point where the maximum vibrations were recorded. For the specific tip geometry where only the sweep angle was taken into account, a total mitigation of the VIV was observed.

Intestinal dysbiosis in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients depend on disease activity. We aimed to characterize the microbiota after 7 years of follow-up in an unselected cohort of IBD patients according to disease activity and disease severity. Fifty eight Crohn's disease (CD) and 82 ulcerative colitis (UC) patients were included. Disease activity was assessed by the Harvey-Bradshaw Index for CD and Simple Clinical Colitis Activity Index for UC. Microbiota diversity was assessed by 16S rDNA MiSeq sequencing. In UC patients with active disease and in CD patients with aggressive disease the richness (number of OTUs, p = 0.018 and p = 0.013, respectively) and diversity (Shannons index, p = 0.017 and p = 0.023, respectively) were significantly decreased. In the active UC group there was a significant decrease in abundance of the phylum Firmicutes (p = 0.018). The same was found in CD patients with aggressive disease (p = 0.05) while the abundance of Proteobacteria phylum showed a significant increase (p = 0.03) in CD patients. We found a change in the microbial abundance in UC patients with active disease and in CD patients with aggressive disease. These results suggest that dysbiosis of the gut in IBD patients is not only related to current activity but also to the course of the disease.

OBJECTIVE: Affective disorders seem associated with aberrant intestinal microbiota but whether this pattern also occurs in individuals at increased heritable risk is unknown. We investigated associations between gut microbiota profiles and affective disorders by comparing monozygotic (MZ) twins concordant (affected twins with unipolar or bipolar disorder in remission) and discordant to affective disorders (high-risk) with MZ twins without affective disorders (low-risk).METHODS: Stool samples were collected from 128 MZ twins and the microbiome was profiled using 16S rDNA sequencing of the V3-V4 region.RESULTS: Affected twins had a lower diversity and an absence of a specific operational taxonomical unit (OTU) in comparison with low-risk twins. The high-risk twins exhibited the same pattern although the lower diversity was only at a trend level. The OTU belonged to the family Christensenellaceae. The findings were not explained by lifestyle factors (smoking, alcohol consumption, body mass index, or psychotropic medication).CONCLUSION: Affected twins in remission and high-risk twins presented aberrant gut microbiota with depletion of a specific OTU. If replicated, this reduced relative sequence absence may together with the globally altered microbiota composition act as a vulnerability marker by accentuating the effect of gene-environment interactions in individuals genetically disposed for an affective disorder.