The Actuator Disc Concept in Phoenics

This study presents two models to simulate a wind turbine. This is done by employing the 1D momentum actuator disc theory in PHOENICS, a general purpose computational fluid dynamics software. To test the general applicability of these models, single wind turbine simulations are conducted using eight different wind turbine models from two manufacturers. The simulations are performed by imposing sheared inflow with hub height wind speeds ranging from 3 m/s up to 25 m/s. A range of computational parameters are investigated, including the resolution of the domain, the thickness of the actuator disc and the iterative convergence criteria. To investigate the wake development produced by these methods, a comparison study is performed with the more complex large-eddy simulation software EllipSys3D using an actuator disc approach for validation purposes. The resulting wind turbine thrust and power outputs from PHOENICS are compared with the experimental power curves and thrust values provided by the manufacturers for each wind turbine. The results show that actuator disc methods are able to provide a reasonable estimation of the conventional wind turbine power and thrust output with low computational effort. Moreover, the results from the preliminary comparison of the wake produced from these two rotor models compare well with the wake produced by the actuator disc in EllipSys3D.