Strategies for reducing cost of Engineering Optimisation

Improvements on CFD methods used in wind farm simulations.
This project seeks to advance numerical methods used during CFD simulations in the wind energy sector. The project has two distinct fields of study: turbine level, and farm level. At turbine level GPU technology is being utilised develop faster, high-fidelity numerical methods, suitable for optimisation. Following this, the code will be coupled with a structural solver and SVD shape optimisation framework developed at the University of Bristol, to facilitate Aero-structural optimisation of turbine blades. At the farm level, a GPU accelerated solver is being developed to incorporate slip-plane meshing, allowing the modelling of multiple moving turbine blades at a reduced computational cost. The key aim for this part of the project is to capture unsteady wake effects on turbine blades, and thus be able to more accurately more and predict the fatigue life behavior of the blades.