Simulation of flowfields induced by wind blades based on a parallelized low-speed flow solver

In this study, a parallel computing technology is applied on the simulation of a wind turbine flow problem. A third-order Roe type flux limited splitting based on a pre-conditioning matrix with an explicit time marching method is used to solve the Navier–Stokes equations. The original FORTRAN code was parallelized with Message Passing Interface (MPI) language and tested on a 64-CPU IBM SP2 parallel computer. The test results show that a significant reduction of computing time in running the model and a super-linear speed up rate is achieved up to 32 CPUs at IBM SP2 processors. The speed up rate is as high as 49 for using IBM SP2 64 processors. The test shows very promising potential of parallel processing to provide prompt simulation of the current wind turbine problems.