Engineering Commons^™

Application Of Reynolds Stress Model Using Direct Modeling And Actuator Disk Approaches For A Small-Scale Wind Turbine, Randall Scott Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

The Reynolds Stress Model (RSM) has been avoided for turbulence closure in CFD simulations of wind turbines, largely due to the computational expense and the high potential for numerical instability. The advantage of using RSM is having access to shear stresses that are not available from two-equation RANS-based closure models like k-e and k-w. Access to the shear stresses will aide in the understanding of how the blade design will affect the wake, particularly in the near-wake region. In this research, the RSM turbulence model has been successfully applied in simulating a three-bladed small-scale wind turbine through a direct-model approach …