fastFoam - an aero-servo-elastic wind turbine simulation method

In the presented aero-servo-elastic co-simulation the connection is established via a partitioned coupling approach, where both codes are kept as an own, utilizing the code coupling environment MpCCI developed by Fraunhofer SCAI. Simulation cases were set-up in FAST and OpenFOAM for two turbines. Results for the smaller NREL phase VI turbine showed that conditions with large yawing or pitching the fastFOAM showed a better agreement to the experimental data. Particularly, in yawed-inflow the correction model employed in FAST was unable to predict the load variations over the rotor rotation. Finally, results for the NREL 5MW turbine indicated that the torque and pitch control can greatly influence the results, and due to blade flexibility the deviations between both CFD methods increased.