Abstract

Three things are accomplished in this work. First, a verified wind turbine model is developed for both turbulent and non-turbulent flows. The verified model is created using AMR-Wind, a mesh-based CFD solver which uses an actuator line model to represent the turbine blades. Second, a database of turbine forces and wake data is compiled using the verified wake model. This data is collected for simulations of two turbines operating in close proximity to one another in various configurations. When the wake of one turbine interacts with another, wake mixing occurs. Wake mixing affects turbine performance and is important for predicting factors such as power production and fatigue from unsteady blade loads. This data can be used for verification of other lower cost tools, such as Lagrangian, vortex-based codes. The third accomplishment of this work was to use the compiled data to evaluate an example Lagrangian, vortex-based code, OLAF. It is found that in many cases, the wakes predicted by OLAF are similar to the wakes predicted by AMR-Wind while requiring less resources to simulate. OLAF did not perform as well at predicting the blade loads and rotor torque and large errors were common in multi-turbine simulations. OLAF was not designed to simulate multiple turbines but was the best option available for this study.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering; Mechanical Engineering

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2025-12-16

Document Type

Thesis

Keywords

Wind Energy, Wind Turbine, AMR-Wind, Computational Fluid Dynamics

Language

english

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