Wind turbine

NOTE: Before running this case, please read the instructions in NACA0012 airfoil incompressible to get an overall idea of the DAFoam optimization setup.

This is an aerodynamic shape optimization case for the NREL6 wind turbine. The summary of the case is as follows:

Case: Wind turbine aerodynamic optimization

Geometry: NREL6

Objective function: Torque

Design variables: 100 FFD points moving in the x and y directions

Constraints: None

Inlet velocity: 7 m/s

Rotation speed: 7.5 rad/s

Mesh cells: 60K

Adjoint solver: turboDAFoam

The configuration files are available at Github. To run this case, first source the DAFoam environment (see Tutorials). Then you can go into the run folder and run:

./Allrun.sh 8

The optimization progress will then be written in the log.opt file. NOTE, we recommend running this case on an HPC system using at least 8 CPU cores.

For this case, the optimization was run for 5 steps, see the following figure. The baseline design has a torque of 631.1 N m, and the optimized design has a torque of 1352.9 N m.

The mesh and FFD points are as follows. We use snappyHexMesh to generate the meshes.