VPM4WIND is a software dedicated to the high-performance simulation (HPC, massively parallel computation) of wind turbine wakes. It provides the unsteady characterization (power, torque, wake, blade loading) of:
- various wind turbine types,
- isolated or in a wind farm, and
- evolving in various atmospheric conditions.
The tool is efficient, accurate and scalable to massively parallel architecture. It has been verified against state-of- the-art and validated against experimental measurements. The used approach accounts for the blade aerodynamics, and allows accurate predictions of the near- and far-wake.
VPM4WIND uses a Vortex Particle-Mesh (VPM) method for the Large Eddy Simulation of wind turbine wakes and coarse scale aerodynamics. It is based on the vorticity formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations, the approach combines the advantages of two discretizations. The particles handle the advection of vorticity, and exploit its compact support. The mesh is used for the evaluation of the differential operators and inside efficient Fourier-based Poisson solvers. The blades are modeled by means of lifting lines. This treatment is similar to a vortex lattice method, although it is here immersed in the mesh and allows the evolution of shed vorticity into a fully turbulent flow.
