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Direct numerical simulation of the flow past a leading edge inflatable tube wing
Axelle Viré Assistant Professor Delft University of Technology Faculty of Aerospace Engineering
Wind Energy Research Group Kluyverweg 1 2629 HS Delft The Netherlands
a.c.vire@tudelft.nl kitepower.tudelft.nl
Direct Numerical Simulations of Flow Past a Leading-Edge Inflatable Wing
Axelle Viré1, Thomas Coudou1,2, Navaneetha Krishnan1, Laurent Bricteux2, Roland Schmehl1 1Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology
2Department of Mechanical Engineering, Université de Mons Leading-edge inflatable wings, such as used in the TU
Delft’s kite power prototype, are commonly used to har-ness wind energy at high altitudes. The wing is composed of a thin canopy, with an inflated tube at the leading edge and pressurized struts to support the membrane. Al-though the kite power concept has demonstrated its ef-ficiency in harnessing wind energy, the detailed aerody-namics of the wing is still unclear. It is particularly inter-esting to understand the interactions between flow vor-tices and the membrane wing, and their impact on the system performance.
In this work, a fully nonlinear Navier-Stokes solver [1] is used to compute the flow past a leading-edge kite power wing. At this stage, relatively low Reynolds numbers (Re ≈ 5000) are considered in order to be able to per-form direct numerical simulations. The code is first vali-dated on a well-benchmarked NACA0012 profile at similar Reynolds numbers. It is then applied to the TU Delft kite power wing. For the latter, dynamic mesh adaptivity [2] is used to resolve the shear layers developing near the kite boundary and in the wake. It is observed that the vortices shed at the leading-edge impact on the canopy, hence potentially generating strong fluid-structure interactions
when the wing is made of deformable fabric materials. This result is expected to hold at higher Reynolds num-bers, although this will be further investigated through large-eddy simulations. |U|/U∞ 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 1.25
Two-dimensional view of the velocity contours of flow past a three-dimensional kite wing at Re = 5000.
References:
[1] Piggott, M.D., Gorman, G.J., Pain, C.C., Allison, P.A., Candy, A.S., Martin, B.T., Wells, M.R.: A new computational framework for multi-scale ocean modelling based on adapting unstructured meshes. Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 56, 1003-1015 (2008)
[2] Hiester, H., Piggott, M.D., Farrell, P.E., Allison P.A.:Assessment of spurious mixing in adaptive mesh simulations of the two-dimensional lock-exchange. Ocean Modell. 73, 30-44 (2014)
