CFD simulation of a multi-rotor system using diffuser augmented wind turbines by lattice Boltzmann method

Abstract

A diffuser-augmented wind turbine (DAWT) achieves greater power generation efficiency by increasing wind speed through the diffuser. Nevertheless, scaling up this technology is difficult because of the considerable amount of wind drag on the diffusers. To overcome this difficulty, a multi-rotor system with two or more wind turbines on the same structure is one approach to increasing wind turbine power output. This research proposes a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method to evaluate the hydrodynamic performance of a large-scale multi-rotor system of DAWTs. Compared to conventional wind turbines, CFD simulations of DAWTs necessitate higher computational costs because of the need of high-resolution meshes for the diffuser. Furthermore, the computational cost of a multi-rotor system increases with the number of rotors. To address the issue of high computational cost, we use the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), which is well suited to large-scale CFD simulations. A wind turbine is modeled as an actuator line model and a diffuser as a wall boundary. An adaptive mesh refinement approach generates higher resolution meshes near the rotor and diffuser. LBM simulations were conducted for a single DAWT and a multi-rotor system with five DAWTs. The LBM results of the wake velocity and pressure distributions were in agreement with those obtained from wind tunnel experiments and general CFD methods in earlier studies. To investigate the diffuser gap effects, we simulated five DAWTs with diffuser gaps of 5%–25% of the diffuser diameter. The power gain of each DAWT was assessed. Great performance improvements were found with diffuser gaps of 20% and 25% of the diffuser diameter. On average, the five DAWTs achieved a power gain of more than 10%. These findings confirmed the accurate evaluation capability of the proposed CFD method for hydrodynamic characteristics of multi-rotor systems using DAWTs.