Towards vortex-based wind turbine design using GPUs and wake accommodation

Abstract

Vortex methods are often cited as a promising alternative to the classical Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory for wind turbine design, overcoming some of its limitations such as imposing steady-state, uniform, and aligned inflows. BEM assumptions are being questioned, especially for large rotors with very flexible blades or even floating wind turbines. However, vortex methods are not yet widespread due to their computational costs. The following work demonstrates how free vortex wake methods using filament discretizations can become an affordable and viable alternative to BEM. This is achieved by combining filament number reduction as well as graphical processing units (GPUs) computations. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches are demonstrated against simple test cases, including an elliptical wing and a rigid horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT). Finally, the approaches are applied to the aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation of floating horizontal axis wind turbines.