Fluid-Structure Interaction: Simulation of an tidal current turbine

Ivana Buntic-Ogor

Institut IHS, University of Stuttgart

Current trends in the development of new technologies for renewable energy systems show the importance of tidal and ocean current exploitation. This also means the development of new turbine types applicable for ocean flows. Latest flow measurements at some economically interesting sites show strong flow fluctuations which can lead to big angle of attack towards the turbine. In order to examine the dynamical behavior of the long and thin structure of the turbine blades, coupled simulations considering fluid flow and structural behavior need to be performed. The scheme allowing two-way coupling between fluid and structure is applied. For this purpose the CFD code FENFLOSS, developed at IHS, is coupled with the commercial FEM-Code ABAQUS. MpCCI is used for conducting simulations and managing data transfer between the two computational fields. Due to the grid size, CFD domain is calculated on more than one CPU, whereas more compact structural grid does now require such computational power.
The implementation of the code driver for FENFLOSS for the current MpCCI version will be presented, as well as interfaces and moving grid algorithms. The setup of the technical and computational problem together with results obtained on a distributed computational grid will be discussed.