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Lattice Boltzmann simulations for multiple tidal turbines using actuator line model

Journal of Hydrodynamics volume 34, pages 372–381 (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

In numerical simulations of tidal current farms, large-scale computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations with a high-resolution grid are required to calculate the interactions between tidal turbines. In this study, we develop a numerical simulation method for tidal current turbines using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), which is suitable for large-scale CFD simulations. Tidal turbines are modeled by using the actuator line (ACL) model, which represents each blade as a group of actuator points in a line. In order to validate our LBM-ACL model, we perform simulations for two interacting tidal turbines, and results of turbine performance are compared with a water tank experiment. The proposed model successfully reproduces the variation of the torque due to wave effects and mean turbine performance. We have demonstrated a large-scale simulation for ten tidal turbines using 8.55×108 grid points and 16 GPUs of Tesla P100 and the simulation has been completed within 9 hours with the LBM performance of 392 MLUPS per GPU.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI (Grant No. JP19H02363). The computation was carried out using the computer resource offered under the category of General Projects by Research Institute for Information Technology, Kyushu University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute for Applied Mechanics, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Seiya Watanabe & Changhong Hu

Authors
  1. Seiya Watanabe
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  2. Changhong Hu
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Correspondence to Seiya Watanabe.

Additional information

Biography: Seiya Watanabe (1991-), Male, Ph. D.

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Watanabe, S., Hu, C. Lattice Boltzmann simulations for multiple tidal turbines using actuator line model. J Hydrodyn 34, 372–381 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42241-022-0037-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42241-022-0037-0

Key words

  • Tidal current turbine
  • lattice Boltzmann method (LBM)
  • actuator line model
  • numerical water tank
  • multi-turbine interaction