Wind Energy Research

The CFD Lab efforts to advance wind energy research is in collaboration with WERC, the College of Engineering and Applied Science's WIND ENERGY RESEARCH CENTER. Our parallel computing research efforts are supported by CISL located in Cheyenne WY and our own on campus supercomputer center operated by ARCC

W2 A2 KE3D

(Wyoming Wind and Aerospace Applications Komputational Environment)

W2 A2 KE3D is an advanced multi-solver technology that combines many years of research to tackle large scale unsteady simulations. Wind turbines are particularly challenging because they require an enormous range of length scales.

  • NSU3D: near body unstructured finite volume solver
  • CARTDG: off body cartesian finite element (DG) solver
  • TIOGA: open-source overset grid assembly library
  • P4est: open-source adaptive mesh refinement library



Lillgrund Wind Farm Simulation

This visualization shows a simulation of the Lillgrund Wind Farm which is located off the coast of southern Sweden. The wind farm contains 48 wind turbines and spans multiple kilometers. The fly-through of the simulation demonstrates the magnitudes of spatial scales needed to resolve wake phenomenon. This simulation contains 10 orders of spatial magnitude. The simulation utilized 62,208 cores and accumulated upto 2.6 billion degrees-of-freedom. There are three isosurfaces of different velocity magnitude shown in the visualization. A ground slice of the adaptive mesh is shown to demonstrate the wake tracking ability of the software. In addition to in-situ data extraction, this was visualized using remote-hosting which allows for the data to remain on the NCAR Cheyenne supercomputer and be rendered in parallel using the supercomputer itself.






Theoretical Wind Turbine: WindPACT-1.5MW

A high-order accurate simulation of the WindPACT-1.5MW wind turbine visualizes the wake propagation and transition to turbulence. This animation, sped up by 2X real-time, shows a center plane cut of the wake with the rotation of the wind turbine blades perpendicular to the plane. Uniform inflow from left to right carries energy into the turbine which is then extracted to generate 1.5 mega-watts of power. Lighter colors show higher tangential velocity to the inflow direction.

The blade-tip vortices form conical wake structures at various locations downstream of the wind turbine. Between 2 (140 meters) and 3 (210 meters) rotor diameters downstream, the blade-tip vortices begin the transition of near-wake to mid-wake through vortex pairing and mixing. The mid-wake region demonstrates a mixing layer where vortex stretching occurs and large turbulent structures begin to develop. The far-wake region, located beyond 560 meters downstream, shows fully turbulent flow where the wake structures merge and break down into smaller turbulent eddies.

This simulation utilized upto 11,300 cores with over 650 million degrees-of-freedom and took nearly one calender month to complete. Approximately 50 rotor revolutions were completed representing over two minutes of physical sim- ulation time.



NREL 5MW Wind Turbine Simulation

This visualization shows an isosurface of velocity magnitude for the simulation of the NREL 5MW wind turbine. It demonstrates the blade-tip vortices that are developed by the rotor which propagate downstream. This isosurface data was collected in real-time via the VisIt Libsim in-situ library. In-situ visualization allows for data extraction at the time the data is being produced by the simulation. By performing visualization and simulation at the same time, the bottleneck of transferring data as a post-processing step is overcome. Once collection of the isosurfaces was complete, the data was visualized in the Unity3D Game Engine performed by the University of Wyoming 3D Visualization Center. The background environment is set in a Wyoming landscape.