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Evan Greer, Mentor: Dr. Marcelo Kobayashi, HARP REU Program August 2, 2012 Contact: evantk@hawaii.edu

Introduction and Motivations Creating the geometry Stationary study of turbine geometry Rotating study of turbine geometry Future Plans Acknowledgements

Energy Security
High reliability of fossil fuels leads to wide spread use Set amount of fossil fuel outputs a set amount of energy

Introduction of reliability to renewable resources, wind energy in particular Wind energy is subject to low reliability due to changing weather conditions Scale predictions of large scale weather patterns to make predictions about the environment around the turbine

The effects of local topography on efficiency will be studied WRF (weather research and forecasting) model coupled with CFD models This is the future goal of this research but first a working model of the turbine must be created and studied

Used a sample geometry from Comsol Multiphysics Played with initial conditions and mesh sizes Learned how to use the Comsol Multiphysics software

Studied introductory tutorial

building a busbar geometry Learned how to set up fluid flow and thermoelectric physics

 Approximated the geometry of a typical wind turbine Height of the tower set at 300 ft

Length of the rotors set at 200 ft

Length of the nacelle set at 40 ft

Front View

Side View

 Created for the implementation of the sliding mesh

Cylindrical region with a height of 80 ft encompassing the blades Domain to move with the blades

 Region where boundary and initial conditions are to be defined

Created a cylindrical region behind the sliding region to study wake

Material for the flow set as air and material for turbine set as aluminum

 Generated mesh using tetrahedral elements Mesh had to be refined around blades Mesh consisted of 93349 elements

Ran a stationary turbulent flow study using a k- model This model has the purpose of understanding how fluid flow is affected by geometry

Used a simple turbulent flow physical model

Stationary study step with no time dependence Inlet velocity of 3.219 m/s, this is the average annual wind speed of Honolulu reported by NOAA [1]

Outlet condition was also set to atmospheric pressure Also, a volume force was introduced on the flow domain

 Used Rotating Machinery, Turbulent Flow physical model Moving domains are coupled with stationary domains by identity pairs At these identity pairs, a flux continuity boundary condition is applied Navier-Stokes equations are formulated based on rotating and stationary coordinate systems

Convergence of time stepped solution

Solution would get stuck on calculation of time step Many issues with script files and runs on supercomputer

Issues with licensing

Jobs would terminate because of lack of licensing on

multiple nodes Solved with batch and cluster computing add-on to job configurations within Comsol

Issues with node communication

Comsol would get kicked nodes Solved using MPD (Multi processing Daemon) used by

Comsol to communicate between nodes Accomplished through modification of script files with the help of Andrew Yukitomo

Isolated rotating geometry Try to get rotating blade working without pairing
Added input and output condition

 Added pairing and flow continuity condition between stationary and rotating domains Used overlapping domains and input and output conditions

Used non-overlapping domains

Got rid of input and output conditions, instead used a pressure point constraint Increased number of iterations used by the solver

Complete the set up of the full rotating geometry Get the blade study to run for larger time scales
Further work needs to be done to understand where

and why the convergence errors are occurring Understanding how to make a more accurate mesh

Introduce the stationary wake region and a two dimensional pairing region

Introduce the flow domain and three dimensional pairing and get the complete model to run
Get the rotation of the turbine to be dictated by inlet velocity conditions
This will involve delving deeper into the interface

to understand how to program physical models

Project benchmarks:
Creating geometry Modeling stationary case

Implementation of sliding mesh

Implementation of Large Eddy Simulation Implementation of WRF data

This research will be continued under a NASA space grant in the fall

I would like to thank Dr. Susan Brown for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this program and Dr. Marcelo Kobayashi for his continued support and allowing me to share in his research. I also want to acknowledge Andrew Yukitomo for his continued help with script files and supercomputing issues and HOSC for allowing us to use the supercomputing facilities for our work.
"This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0852082. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."

[1] Delliger, Dan, 2008, Average Wind Speed, Comparative Climate Data, http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/avgwind.html (July 5, 2012)
[2] Laminar Flow in a Baffled Stirred Mixer. Comsol Multiphysics 4.3 sample program documentation, 2012