High fidelity fluid-structure interaction simulation of a multi-megawatt airborne wind energy reference system in cross-wind flight

Abstract

Airborne wind energy (AWE) is an emerging technology for the conversion of wind energy into electricity by flying crosswind patterns with a tethered aircraft connected to a generator either on board or on the ground. Having a proper understanding of the unsteady interaction of the air with the flexible and dynamic system during operation is key to developing viable AWE systems. The research goal is to simulate the time-varying fluid-structure interaction (FSI) of an AWE system in a crosswind flight maneuver using high fidelity simulation tools. In this work a framework is presented that serves as a proof of concept to perform high fidelity simulations of airborne wind energy systems. This is done using a partitioned and explicit approach in the open-source coupling tool CoCoNuT. An existing finite element method (FEM) model of the wing structure is coupled with a newly developed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the wing aerodynamics including rigid body motion. It has been found that the mesh deformation is quite sensitive to dynamic mesh parameters. On the other hand, the overset/Chimera technique has been proven to be a robust approach to simulate the motion of an AWE system in CFD simulations.