OpenFOAM Computation of Interacting Wind Turbine Flows and Control (I): Free Rotating Case

We develop high-fidelity blade resolved CFD for interacting turbine flows by the open source software OpenFOAM. Multi-turbine configurations are considered, aimed at a study of wind-turbine flows and their interactions. The preprocessing, coding, turbulence modelling and visualisation are discussed and described. An extension of our CFD work to a turbine operating in a two-phase flow is also included. Snapshots of interacting turbine flows are illustrated and dynamic motions can be viewed in animation videos. Two turbulence models, RANS k-epsilon and LES, were used.