Validation of a free vortex filament wake module for the integrated simulation of multi-rotor wind turbines
Raquel Martín-San-Román, Pablo Benito-Cia, José Azcona, Alvaro Cuerva‐Tejero
Abstract
M ulti wind t U rbine S imulation T ool (MUST) is a new CENER's in-house code, based on NREL's OpenFAST code, designed to allow the aero-hydro-servo-elastic modelling of novel multi-rotor wind turbine concepts. MUST also includes a new aerodynamic module, called AeroVIEW ( Aero dynamic V ortex f I lam E nt W ake) based on an implementation of the Free Vortex filament Method (FVM) combined with an unsteady Lifting Line (LL). This model allows to represent the influence existing between all the rotors, in each one of them. In this article, a validation of AeroVIEW performance for single and multi-rotor configurations is presented. First, a study of the wake properties (wake geometry, core radius and circulation of tip vortex filament) obtained with AeroVIEW has been successfully compared with several MexNext III cases. Then, an analysis of the rotor wakes interaction, in different arrays of wind turbines, has been made, obtaining power and thrust increases, due to this rotor-wake interaction, for different conditions. The increases obtained in power are very similar to results of high fidelity tools found in the literature. Moreover, this beneficial effect on the power generated, has a counterpart in the average thrust, whose increase is around half of the power production increase.