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

石油和天然气成本的上升和价格的波动，以及它们供应的减少，产生了对更便宜、可持续的替代能源的需求，如风能。因此，世界各国都在大力发展风能技术。美国政府制定了一个雄心勃勃的目标，到2025年，25%的电力来自风能，这可能只有在尖端风能研究的帮助下才能实现，这要求必须用高精度的方法和工具来创造和分析变革性的概念和设计(例如，浮动海上风力涡轮机)。这些方法包括复杂几何、3D、时间相关、多物理预测模拟方法和软件，随着风能需求的增长，这些方法和软件将发挥越来越重要的作用。该项目的重点是开发一个完全集成的流固耦合软件框架，用于在三维和全空间尺度上计算真实的风力涡轮机设计。等距分析作为拱顶几何建模和仿真技术，具有良好的几何建模特性和较高的预自由度精度，可用于流体和结构的分析。从高效利用高性能计算(HPC)资源的角度来看，后一种特性具有很大的好处。所提出的计算框架被用于研究真实的、全尺寸的风力涡轮机设计。它能够应对超出该领域当前模拟方法范围的科学和工程挑战。最终，在该项目中开发的方法有望成为风力涡轮机模拟的“黄金标准”。

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.