Thomas Haas

KU Leuven – Research Group on Turbulent Flow Simulation and Optimization

Monday, January 16, 2017, 11:00

Room 01-012, Georges-Köhler-Allee 102, Freiburg 79110, Germany

State-of-the-art methods of Computational Fluid Dynamics enable to investigate the performance of wind energy systems such as conventional wind farms or airborne wind energy systems. With a profound understanding of the interaction between these wind energy systems and the wind environment, it is possible to improve their efficiency and thus increase the overall power production. The research group on Turbulent Flow Simulation and Optimization of KU Leuven, Belgium, has developed a computational framework to perform simulations of wind energy systems in the wind environment.

This talk will demonstrate the capability of the developed tool SPWind in the context of wind energy application. The fundamentals of Computational Fluid Dynamics will be briefly presented with a focus on the Large Eddy Simulation methodology that is used in the SPWind solver. Different modelling approaches for wind energy systems will be discussed and finally simulation results including flow and wake characteristics will be presented.