Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Offshore Turbine Arrays: Numerical Modeling And Experimental Validation, Thomas Kroll, William Hall, Ian Gagnon

Honors Theses and Capstones

The interaction between wind turbines in a large wind farm needs to be better understood to reduce array losses and improve energy production. A numerical test bed for an array of offshore wind turbines was developed in the open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework OpenFOAM. It provides a computational tool which can be used in combination with physical model turbine array studies in the Flow Physics Facility (FPF) at UNH as well as other test facilities.

Turbines were modeled as actuator disks with turbulence sources to reduce computational cost. Both k-ϵ and k-ω SST turbulence models were utilized to capture …