Characterization of the unsteady flow in the nacelle region of a modern wind turbine

A three-dimensional Navier–Stokes solver has been used to investigate the flow in the nacelle region of a wind turbine where anemometers are typically placed to measure the flow speed and the turbine yaw angle. A 500 kW turbine was modelled with rotor and nacelle geometry in order to capture the complex separated flow in the blade root region of the rotor. A number of steady state and unsteady simulations were carried out for wind speeds ranging from 6 m s−1 to 16 m s−1 as well as two yaw and tilt angles. The flow in the nacelle region was found to be highly unsteady, dominated by unsteady vortex shedding from the cylindrical part of the blades, which interacted with the root vortices from each blade, generating high-velocity gradients. As a consequence, the nacelle wind speed and the nacelle flow angle were found to vary significantly with the height above the nacelle surface. The nacelle anemometry showed significant dependence on both yaw and tilt angles with yaw errors of up to 10 degrees when operating in a tilted inflow. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.