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Aerospace Engineering

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Aerodynamics

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Rough Airfoil Simulation For Wind Turbine Applications, Nathaniel B. Develder Mar 2020

Rough Airfoil Simulation For Wind Turbine Applications, Nathaniel B. Develder

Doctoral Dissertations

As a result of insects or other environmental fouling, surface roughness on wind turbine blades can reduce power output significantly. Superhydrophobic surfaces, though possibly a passive, cost-saving, answer to the problem of ice accretion on wind turbine rotors in cold climates, may alter turbulence development in the blade boundary layer similar to environmental roughness. This work uses an equivalent sand grain extension to the Turbulent Potential model to computationally assess the aerodynamic effects of surface roughness on the s809 airfoil, including a representational superhydrophobic surface. Rough surface boundary layer theory, application of the equivalent sand grain method, roughness parameter correlation, …


Modeling Dynamic Stall For A Free Vortex Wake Model Of A Floating Offshore Wind Turbine, Evan M. Gaertner Nov 2014

Modeling Dynamic Stall For A Free Vortex Wake Model Of A Floating Offshore Wind Turbine, Evan M. Gaertner

Masters Theses

Floating offshore wind turbines in deep waters offer significant advantages to onshore and near-shore wind turbines. However, due to the motion of floating platforms in response to wind and wave loading, the aerodynamics are substantially more complex. Traditional aerodynamic models and design codes do not adequately account for the floating platform dynamics to assess its effect on turbine loads and performance. Turbines must therefore be over designed due to loading uncertainty and are not fully optimized for their operating conditions. Previous research at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst developed the Wake Induced Dynamics Simulator, or WInDS, a free vortex wake …


Free Wake Potential Flow Vortex Wind Turbine Modeling: Advances In Parallel Processing And Integration Of Ground Effects, Nathaniel B. Develder Jan 2014

Free Wake Potential Flow Vortex Wind Turbine Modeling: Advances In Parallel Processing And Integration Of Ground Effects, Nathaniel B. Develder

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Potential flow simulations are a great engineering type, middle-ground approach to modeling complex aerodynamic systems, but quickly become computationally unwieldy for large domains. An N-body problem with N-squared interactions to calculate, this free wake vortex model of a wind turbine is well suited to parallel computation. This thesis discusses general trends in wind turbine modeling, a potential flow model of the rotor of the NREL 5MW reference turbine, various forms of parallel computing, current GPU hardware, and the application of ground effects to the model. In the vicinity of 200,000 points, current GPU hardware was found to be nearly 17 …