Liam F1 Wind Turbine CFD Simulation by ANSYS Fluent

Liam F1 Wind Turbine, ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation Training

This project studies Liam F1 Wind Turbine CFD Simulation using ANSYS Fluent software. We perform this CFD project and investigate it by CFD analysis.

Currently, the most-efficient wind turbine designs are not particularly suited for residential installation. They require enough height to catch the wind to be of any use, and then there are noise complaints. Also, bird strikes could be a cause for concern, similar to large-scale wind farms.

Scaling down wind turbines does not help with these problems, so residential systems remain an oddity.

However, recently, an entirely new small-scale wind turbine design named Liam-F1 Urban Wind Turbine can operate at approximately 80% of the Betz Limit, or 47.4% overall efficiency, which states that the theoretical maximum efficiency of any wind turbine is only 59.3%.

Commercial wind turbines max out at 50% of the Betz Limit or just 29.7% efficiency. Due to these unique attributes, in this study, CFD has been employed to evaluate this type of turbine evaluation in an arbitrary wind tunnel situation.

The present model is designed in three dimensions using the Design Modeler software. The geometry included a rotary zone for the turbine walls and a stationary zone for the rest of the domain.

The meshing of the model was done using ANSYS Meshing software. Also, 5 prism layers were added adjacent to the wind tunnel walls and the turbine’s body to calculate the boundary layer accurately. The element number is equal to 1249235.

Also, due to the nature of the present problem, the transient solver has been enabled.

Liam F1 Methodology

By assuming an isothermal, incompressible, and steady-state condition for the air around the blades, two forces are known as the Coriolis, and centripetal accelerations are the important source terms that are exerting on the flow elements.

Briefly, the governing mass and momentum equations are written as follows:

Moreover, the frame motion technique has been used to model the rotating motion of the turbine. Using this technique, there is no need to define an interface between the stationary and rotating domains.

This technique stimulates the turbine motion by rotating the flow within the rotating domain, reducing the computational cost of modeling such problems. The rotating domain rotates with a rotational velocity of 300 RPM.

Furthermore,  the flow field is fully turbulent. Thus, we select the k-w-SST turbulent model for the evaluation of eddies.

The noted model has been more accurate than any other eddy-viscosity variation due to a hybrid formulation that takes care of both wall effects and the core flow strain rate. The air enters the domain with a velocity of 3m/s and passes over the designed turbine.

Liam F1 Conclusion

At the end of the solution process, two and three-dimensional contours related to velocity, pressure, and streamlines are obtained.

As shown in the pressure contour over the turbine blades’ surfaces, the turbine wall’s leading edge suffers from the highest-pressure gradient, which is logical since the velocity has just met zero.

We present contour and streamlines for the velocity field to give insight into the problem. Briefly, the velocity field adjacent to the turbine’s wall has the highest gradient, and the wake that arises from it stretches far behind the bird’s body. This could be, again, observed through the velocity vectors.

Additionally, the streamlines vectors illustrate the quality of the flow streams resolved in the wake section, depicted in Figure, which is the core challenge of aerodynamic simulation. Finally, we calculate the drag force  0.14 (N), which is accurate for a turbine with the noted specifications.