| dc.description.abstract | Wind energy is the mainstream source of clean and renewable energy and it is also the fastest-growing source of sustainable energy in the world. In the Global Wind Energy Council's report in 2014, wind industry grew 44% worldwide. In order to optimize the efficiency of wind farms, it is important to observe wake interactions among wind turbines. Computational mathematics and mechanics provide fundamental methods and tools for simulating physical processes. Numerical computation can offer important insights and data that are either difficult or expensive to measure or to perform tests experimentally. In this dissertation, we use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software OpenFOAM and ANSYS FLUENT to simulate the wake effect of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) and related problems. Numerical simulation can also help us comprehend and control man-made disasters. Air craft crashworthiness and human survivability are of utmost concerns in any emergency landing situation. Motivated by the air incidents lately, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in March 2014 and Germanwings Flight 9525 crash in March 2015, we use Computational Structural Dynamics (CSD) software ANSYS Explicit Dynamics and LS-DYNA to try different numerical simulations of Airbus A320 crashing into a wall and compare the results to the reality.
We calculate three CFD problems in this dissertation: lid-driven problems, one turbine wake problem, and two serial turbines wake problem. We simulate a lid-driven flow in both two- (2D) and three-dimension (3D) to compare the simulation capability of the three turbulence modelings, i.e., Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS), Large Eddy Simulation (LES), and Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Equations Simulation (RANS) by OpenFOAM. Among these three turbulence models, we can find that LES is capable of capturing more details of turbulence flow. We simulate the airflow effect of one wind turbine with both fixed angular velocity and wind-driven case, run benchmark tests based on NRELs reports, and compare the numerical results under the same condition by OpenFOAM and FLUENT. For the fixed angular velocity case, we use wind speed 8 m/s and angular velocity of the wind turbine 75 deg/s. For the wind-driven case, we use wind speed 8 m/s and 16 m/s and the angular velocity of the wind turbine calculated by FLUENT converges faster than OpenFOAM case. We simulate the interactions of wake flow for two serial wind turbines by FLUENT. We use wind speed 8 m/s and angular velocity of the wind turbine 75 deg/s. The wake of former turbine affects the rear one and the diffusion of flow caused by two turbines can be seen clearly. For both one and two serial turbines problems, the turbulence model RANS kε is used. We calculate and simulate Airbus A320 crashing into a wall by ANSYS Explicit Dynamics and LS-DYNA. For ANSYS Explicit Dynamics, we use the angle of approach 0º, 15º, and 30º. For LS-DYNA, we only test the pitch angles 0º. For all cases, we use the speed of aircarft 200 m/s. The deformation of both aircraft and wall can be seen clearly.
Numerical simulation can also help us comprehend and control man-made disasters. Air craft crashworthiness and human survivability are of utmost concerns in any emergency landing situation. Motivated by the air incidents lately, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in March 2014 and Germanwings Flight 9525 crash in March 2015, we use Computational Structural Dynamics (CSD) software ANSYS Explicit Dynamics and LS-DYNA to try different numerical simulations of Airbus A320 crashing into a wall and compare the results to the reality. The demonstration of aircraft crash calculation by Explicit Dynamics and LS-DYNA, snapshots of aircraft crashing into a wall, and the links of animation videos can be seen in Chapter 5. | en |
