Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine CFD Simulation, ANSYS Fluent Tutorial

Description

Description

New generations of wind turbines for domestic applications generate more energy than older ones. The Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine is a small wind turbine with a diameter of around 1 meter. It’s also suitable for installation on roofs.

In this project, a 3D Liam F1 turbine is modeled, and airflow of 15m/s is simulated while passing through the turbine, making it rotate at a constant angular velocity of 240 rpm.
The geometry of the solution is a 3D rectangular enclosure whose’ lengths in X, Y, and Z directions are 21.3m, 15.6m, and 15.6m, respectively.

There is a Liam F1 Turbine at the coordinate origin with a diameter of 1.46m. Its length of 1.2m is in line with the X direction. Design Modeler software is used to create the geometry of the solution. ANSYS Meshing software is used for generating meshes of the solution. The elements are all unstructured, and the number of them is 835,689.

Methodology: Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine

The pressure-based solver is employed due to the incompressibility of the air. The gravitational acceleration is ignored. Also, the simulation is performed in steady form. MRF option is enabled to model the rotational movement of the turbine.

Conclusion

At the end of the solution process, two-dimensional contours and vectors related to air pressure, velocity, turbulence kinetic energy, and relative velocity are obtained. Airflow enters the domain with a velocity of 15m/s and hits the turbine. The Liam F1 rotates at 240 rpm and then the flow moves outside the domain.

The drag force of the turbine due to the wind is 190.16 N, and the difference in mass flow rate at inlet and outlet boundary conditions is figured as follows at each iteration to see the convergence of mass inside the domain.