CAREER: Fluid-Structure Interaction and High-Performance Computing for Wind Energy Applications

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The rising costs and fluctuating prices of oil and natural gas, as well as their diminishing supplies, create the need for cheaper, sustainable alternative energy sources, such as wind. As a result, countries around the world are putting substantial effort into the development of wind energy technologies. The US Government established an ambitious goal of 25% electricity from wind by 2025, which may only be achieved with the help of leading-edge wind energy research, and which calls for transformative concepts and designs (e.g., floating offshore wind turbines) that must be created and analyzed with high-precision methods and tools. These include complex-geometry, 3D, time dependent, multi-physics predictive simulation methods and software that will play an increasingly important role as demand for wind energy grows. The project focuses on the development of a fully integrated fluid-structure interaction software framework for computation of real wind turbine designs in 3D and at full spatial scale. Isogeometric Analysis is adopted as the over-arching geometry modeling and simulation technology due to its favorable geometry modeling properties, and superior pre-degree-of-freedom accuracy for the analysis of fluids and structures. The latter characteristic has great benefits from the standpoint of efficient utilization of high performance computing (HPC) resources. The proposed computational framework is employed in the investigation of real-life, full-scale wind turbine designs. It is capable of addressing scientific and engineering challenges that are beyond the scope of the current simulation methods in the field. Ultimately, the methodology developed in this project is envisioned to become the ``gold standard" in wind turbine simulation.