International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer 37 (2010) 10441047

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International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / i c h m t

Study of aerodynamical interference for a wind turbine

Shy-Yea Lin, Tzong-Hann Shieh
Department of Aerospace and Systems Engineering, Feng Chia University, No. 100, Whnhwa Rd., Seatwenn, Taichung 40724, Taiwan

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online 6 July 2010

Keywords:
Wind turbine aerodynamics
NREL Phase VI
Tower interference model

a b s t r a c t
A two-dimensional interference model of upwind wind turbine, based on NREL Phase VI, was simulated by
an available NavierStokes solver under parallel process. The simulation domain was divided into a
stationary tower domain and a sliding blade domain with varying geometric factors, including blade chord to
tower diameter ratio and tower-blade gap to tower diameter ratio, to gure out the unsteady problem. The
turbulence model was treated with SST k turbulence model and the boundary layers around the solid
walls were rened by the y+ value. The simulated results of velocity eld were compared with the potential
cylinder ow, and some phenomena were exhibited, including the movement of stagnation point of tower,
the skewed wake of tower and the excess of velocity in the eld. The lift force coefcient of blade was
different from the ideal angle of attack for the blade passing in front of the potential cylinder ow.
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Under the pressure of a shortage of energy and change of climate,
renewable energy, like wind energy, solar energy, biofuel, geothermal,
etc., provides human another way to relieve those problems. In
addition to hydroelectric power, wind is one of the fastest developing
resources of renewable energy in recent several years, and wind
turbine is the mostly used commercial devices around the world. At
the end of 2008, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered
generator was 121.2 GW, which is about 1.5% of worldwide electricity
usage and is continuously and rapidly growing [1].
Wind turbine, which converts kinetic energy in the wind into
electric power, is a kind of complex electromechanical system. In
order to receive the demand for energy, the capacity of wind turbine
has a steep rise, inducing a high degree of reliability throughout their
life span, better structure, performance and optimum design.
Therefore some of the most important factors, including tower
interference on upwind wind turbine, dynamic stall effect and
vibration of blades induced by aeroelastics, affecting loading-history
interest us extremely.
The Blade Element Theory (BET), originally conceived by William
Froude in the 1870s, is an analysis method that gives basic insights
and other characteristics in the rotor performance. Later Betz [2]
extend the Momentum Theory, worked by Rankine and Froude and
known as Disk Actuator Theory, to include the rotation of the
slipstream. Betz also proposed the well known Betz limit, which
shows that, the ideal maximum efciency has no more than 59% of the
Communicated by: W.J. Minkowycz.
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: shyyealin@gmail.com (S.-Y. Lin), thshieh@fcu.edu.tw
(T.-H. Shieh).
0735-1933/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.icheatmasstransfer.2010.06.015

kinetic energy contained in a stream tube having the same cross area
as the rotor can be converted into useful work.
For a three bladed constant speed wind turbine, it experiences a
periodic pulsation, but there is no clear dependence between the
periodic power components and the wind shear or turbulence
intensity [3]. The interference mechanisms differ by the upwind or
downwind wind turbines. For downwind wind turbines the interference mechanisms were induced by the tower shadow, which is more
dominant than the wind shear effect in determining the dynamic
torque [4]. The interaction between the rotor and the tower induces
signicant increases in the transient loads on the blades and is
characterised by an instant unloading and subsequent reloading of the
blade, associated with the velocity decit in the wake, combined with
the interaction with the shed vortices, which causes a strongly time
varying response [5].
For upwind wind turbines, the interference mechanisms are
governed by aerodynamic coupling of the blades and the tower and
the velocity eld around the tower. Frueh et al. [6] modelled the
upwind perturbation of free wind through the tower as a timedependent boundary condition on a Computational Fluid Dynamic
(CFD) model of a turbine blade section, and their investigation
showed that the perturbation ow not only causes a pulse of effective
velocity but also a sharper change of the effective angle of attack of
around 10%, furthermore the increasing pulse acts as a mechanism to
reattach the ow which would be fully detached in the free case.
Gmez and Seume [7,8] proposed an aerodynamic coupling of rotor
and tower which showed that induced unsteady circulations cannot
be accounted for using a traditional blade element momentum
analysis with BeddoesLeishman dynamic stall model. The induced
ow meandered the wake of tower and unsteady lateral loads on the
tower, and a correction function for the lift coefcient of the blade was
accounted for the aerodynamic coupling with the tower.

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Nomenclature
C
D
G
L
P
R, r
u, v
x, y
y+

Chord length, dimensionless coefcient

Tower diameter
Gap between tower and blade
Lift force, N/m
Static pressure, N/m2
Radius, r2 = x2 + y2
Components of velocities
Cartesian coordinate axes
Dimensionless wall normal coordinate

Greek symbols

Fluid density
Fig. 1. Velocity eld for potential ow around a circular cylinder with free stream ow
from down to up.

Subscripts
b
Blade
w
Wind

Conditions in the free stream

the angle of attack. Fig. 2 gives a preview of aerodynamics for the

blade while it passes in front of the tower.
3. Model description and methodology

There are detailed data for geometric and real scale wind tunnel
experimental tests for the two-bladed wind turbine of NREL Phase VI
[9]. Gonzalez and Munduate [10] undertook the parked blade and the
rotating conguration, both for the upwind two-bladed wind turbine
operating at non-yawed conditions. Some predictions and CFD
simulations were also be proposed [1113]. In this study, an unsteady
two-dimensional upwind wind turbine of NREL Phase VI with blade
prole of S809 was modelled under fully turbulent situation. The
aerodynamics for both blade and tower would be discussed under
variation of geometric lengths of blade chord and gap between blade
and tower.

3.1. Geometric conguration

2. Simple tower interference model

The simplest way to gure out the interference of tower and blade
is to couple the model of potential ow around a circular cylinder and
thin airfoil theory. Assuming that the centre of the tower with radius
of R0 is in the origin of the coordinate under the condition of potential
ow with wind velocity magnitude vw owing from down to up, then
the velocity eld can be depicted as Fig. 1 with velocity components as
2

u = 2vw xyR0 = r

The current aerodynamic problem of wind turbine in interference

of tower and blade was simulated with computational uid dynamic
code. The simulations were run on an Intel quad core CPUQ8300 @
2.5GH on a Windows XP 32-bit system under parallel process with
principle axis partition gird. The computational domain was divided
and meshed separately as tower zone and blade zone. The relative
motion between blade and tower was modelled by sliding mesh with
regardless the motion in the direction perpendicular to the sliding
plane.

In this study a two-dimensional tower interference model, based

on horizontal axis wind turbine of NREL Phase VI with S809 cross
section of blade (see Fig. 3), for which detailed comparison of
measurements and computational results exist [7], was proposed to
investigate the interference of tower and blade without consideration
of twist and pitch angle. For the model, the diameter of tower is equal
to the chord length of the blade and the gap between centre of the
tower and the blade is 1 times upwind tower diameter. Besides, the
chord length of the blade is 0.937, 1 and 1.125 times the tower

and
2

v = vw 1y x R0 = r ;

where r2 = x2 + y2. Stagnation points locate at the front and the back
of the tower, and the maximum velocity as twice wind speed locates
at the both sides. Far away from the tower velocity eld appears no
difference from the free stream. Secondly, for an upwind wind
turbine, the motion of the blade can be regarded as an airfoil with
velocity of ub passing in front of the tower from left to right, then the
blade will experience variations of velocity, then the angle of attack
for the blade with different gaps between tower and blade could be
estimated as Fig. 2. The angle of attack will decrease while closing to
the tower and then get back to the steady state. From the thin airfoil
theory by Milne-Thomson [14], for small angles of attack, as long as
the ow on the airfoil remains attached, the lift will vary linearly with

Fig. 2. Angle of attack for blade in potential ow model in front of the tower.

1046

S.-Y. Lin, T.-H. Shieh / International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer 37 (2010) 10441047

Fig. 3. S809 prole [9].

diameter as it locates at r/R of 95%, 90% and 80% for the rotor of NREL
Phase VI.
For the blade a total of 280 elements were used and a total of 304
elements were employed for the tower. The total elements were
about 5.2 104 to 5.5 104 depending on the conguration. The
computational domain is 13 times greater than the diameter of tower
in both Cartesian directions. The SST k turbulence model was
chosen with turbulence intensity of 5% and turbulent length scale of
0.1 m, and both tower and blade solid boundaries were further rened
by y+ value within 1 to 10.

3.2. Boundary conditions

The simulation domain was separated as a stationary tower
domain and a translational sliding blade domain. The free stream
wind ows from down to up with speed of vw = 49.8075 m/s as
velocity inlet, and the relative motion between both tower and blade
domains is set with a translational velocity of ub = 7 m/s. These would
lead to an angle of attack of 8. The left as right boundary was set to
periodic boundaries and the overlapped interfaces of the tower and
the blade domains are set as repeating interface.

3.3. Solver and stopping criteria

The unsteady two-dimensional simulations presented here were
based on pressure based NavierStokes solver with time steps of
0.2 ms. Because of numerical convergence at rst about 1.8 s of realtime simulation, most simulations were stopped after 3.142 s of realtime simulation to reach steady-state condition. During every time
step, it required about 2030 iterations to achieve convergence levels
with momentum-related variables lower than 4 105 and turbulence-related variables lower than 1 106. The simulations took
around one to two days to complete.

Fig. 5. Lateral tower force coefcient. The line is the mean value of the last three passes
of the blade.

4. Results
While the blade with cross section of S809 passes in front of the
tower, the velocity elds for different gaps (see Fig. 4) indicate some
features that had not been predicted by potential ow model. The
central line between tower and blade is the interface of the tower and
the blade domains, and the velocity eld varies continuously and
smoothly across the interface by sliding mesh algorithm. When the
blade is far away from the tower, the stagnation locates at the lower
position of the tower as predicted by potential ow, but the stagnation point moves as a pendulum to the right then back to the left
while the blade is passing, as well as the skewed wake of the tower.
The simulated velocity eld exhibited excess against by potential
ow that was clipped as blank in Fig. 4. The wind between tower and
blade was been accelerated due to the nite space and the thickness of
the blade, then the stagnation point was been pushed. From Bernoulli
equation, the acceleration of the wind induces suction between the
blade and the tower. This can be conrmed from temporal lateral
force of the tower while the blade passed in front of the tower (see
Fig. 5). The lateral force of the tower follows the temporal location of
the blade.
Fig. 6 is the pressure distribution on the blade with normalized
chord, and the pressure coefcient is dened as
2

CP = PP = 0:5 vw + ub ;

where P is static pressure and P is free-stream static pressure. From

the normal force along the y direction and lateral force along the x

Fig. 4. Velocity elds. The central line is the interface of the tower and the blade domains. The blade passing in front of the tower induced displacement of stagnation point of the
tower, transient skewed tower wake and velocity exceeds against potential ow model.

S.-Y. Lin, T.-H. Shieh / International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer 37 (2010) 10441047

1047

Fig. 6. Blade pressure coefcients while the blade passes in front of the tower.

Fig. 7. Blade lift force coefcient.The line is the mean value of the last three passes of the
blade.

direction, the lift force coefcient can be attributed regardless of

instantaneous variation of angle of attack by induced velocity (see
Fig. 7), and

Mathematical Sciences, National Chengchi University for their helpful

discussions over this work.
References

CL = L = 0:5 vw + ub C;

where L is lift force and C is chord length. The lift force coefcient is
not linearly coincident with the angle of attack predicted by potential
ow model in Fig. 2. The steep increase, induced by the acceleration of
the wind between the blade and the tower, in Fig. 7 was not predicted
by the potential model. That is to say, the velocity eld was distorted
violently by the passing blade, the simple potential ow model
around a circular cylinder could not predict well the interference.
5. Conclusions
An unsteady two-dimensional horizontal axis upwind wind
turbine, base on NREL Phase VI with rotor cross section of S809, was
investigated by computational uid dynamic with parallel process.
The aerodynamics of interference of tower and blade were constructed by potential cylinder ow and SST k turbulence model.
The simulated results exhibited that, the sliding mesh algorithm
worked well in this tower interference model, the stagnation point of
the tower moved at the front of the tower, the wake of the tower
skewed and the velocity exceeded against by potential ow.
Acknowledgments
This study was completed due to the support of the National
Science Council (NSC98-2221-E-035-047-MY3 and NSC97-2221-E035-032-MY2) and the Institute of Turbomachinery and Fluid
Dynamics-TFD, Leibniz University Hannover. We want also to thank
to Prof. J.R. Seume of TFD and Prof. M. R. Li of the Department of

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