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