Simulating a Lenz2 Turbine with OpenFOAM

This video shows some output I generated when I simulated a Lenz2 turbine with the turbDyMFoam simulator of OpenFOAM. The partial revolution took about 20 hours for a 64 bit computer to calculate.

Besides doing pictures and diagrams, the software can also calculate torques and forces so you can measure the power output of the simulated turbine. I still have much to learn about the use of this program.

The wind in the simulation is 15MPH (6.7 m/s) in the +X direction. The turbine is moving with a TSR of 0.8.

OpenFOAM is a free program, but its intended to run on Linux and is extremely complicated. I'm an Engineer and normally good with computers and it took a month of my free time to figure out how to install and use this program.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Energy
• wind
• turbine
• Lenz2
• Lenz
• OpenFOAM
• CFD
• Fluid Dynamics

[RealSaladsamurai]

Nice work! I am wondering what software you used to generate the model? Is that SolidWorks? Or does openFOAM have modelling capabilities built in? (Or both?) Thanks for your time :)

[sjh7132]

@RealSaladsamurai solid works was used to write an STL file which can be read by SnappyHexMesh in OpenFoam. It took a lot of manual tweeking to get it working.

[gattopoldo]

Awesome work there, are you using ubuntu as platform?

[sjh7132]

@gattopoldo Yes, and it was a pain to get it working. I'm not sure with the later versions if I could even do it. again.

[hsafti]

I am currently learning OpenFOAM. The user manual does not give much details on coupling different solvers and mesh motion. Would you please guide me to learning material and tutorials for these tasks ....

[sjh7132]

@hsafti There is only one version of openfoam that I know of that can rotate meshes and it's a derivative of openfoam by a different group of people. The version is Openfoam-1.5-dev. If you can find and install that version I can probably send you some examples.

[navvabk]

Hi sjh7132,

It is a very interesting work! Do you have any tutorial which can be helpful to understand the details of what you did?

Thanks a lot!

[dmobbs01]

Would it be possible for.you to make some tutorials?

[HeavyDemir]

jup , it's cool

[curva130r]

WOW... Thanks for this demostration!