An integrated numerical method for wind turbine flow simulation, sound generation and propagation

Abstract

The scope of the paper is to present an efficient numerical method that predicts: (a) wind turbine aerodynamic loads and power; (b) wind turbine noise source; (c) long distance wind turbine noise source propagation. The numerical methods involved in this study are a combination of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind turbine aeroacoustic methods. The results from the CFD simulation provide necessary information of wind turbine power and thrust etc. The 2D Actuator Disc (AD) theory is applied for such a purpose. The computational efficiency becomes very high while using a steady 2D CFD approach. The flow geometry at each blade element is required for wind turbine noise source calculations. The predicted wind turbine noise source is the starting field for long distance noise propagation model which is based on solving the Parabolic Equations (PE) in the frequency domain. Results showed that the integrated wind turbine flow-acoustic prediction method is capable of calculating wind turbine aerodynamic, aerodynamic noise source and long range sound propagation.