Modeling the Wake of MEXICO Experiment's Wind Turbine Using Elliptic Force Distribution in Actuator-Line Method in OpenFOAM

Wind turbines are highly complex structures for numerical flow simulation. Today, developments and increasing the use of wind energy in the world has created a demand for increasingly accurate and efficient models for wind applications. Wind turbine wakes have significant effects on decreasing the produced power and blades fatigue loads. thus, the wakes study has great importance in wind turbine simulations. Actuator line model (ALM) is one of the most accurate models for characterization of the flow field and the turbulent wakes created by the turbines. AL model does not require boundary layer resolution and is thus significantly more efficient than the fully-resolved computations. this model can accurately simulate the wakes of wind turbines operating in a flow field without any need to create or import the CAD models of turbine and just by using turbine parameters. In this paper, AL method implemented in openFOAM solver and a new method used to spread forces on actuator lines. in order to validate the results, MEXICO rotor was modeled and large eddy simulation’s turbulence model is used to investigate the flow field around wind turbine. Simulation has been done for two different conditions include design conditions and stalled conditions. Results obtained for predicted wakes and performance parameters, were compared to experimental data and it was observed that the ALM results agree well with measured data. Stall condition’s results were in better agreement with experimental dada so that the thrust had 8.5% difference and the toque and power had 2.8 and 2.4% respectively.