Computational Aerodynamics Laboratory

Research in the Computational Aerodynamics Laboratory at METU RÜZGEM mainly focuses on wind turbine rotor aerodynamics, airfoil and rotor blade design and analyses, flow control devices, wind turbine wake interactions, and wind farm simulations.

Numerical studies are performed by using various in-house codes, as well as open-source codes and commercial software packages. In airfoil and rotor aerodynamic analyses, various methods are used, from momentum theory and Blade-Element Theory (BET) Analysis to potential flow solutions to advanced Navier-Stokes flow simulations: Blade-Element Momentum (BEM) Analysis, Panel/Free-Wake Methods, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Simulations: Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) Simulation, Detached-Eddy Simulation (DES), Large Eddy Simulation (LES).

In METU RÜZGEM, the following software is mainly used in the numerical studies:

• BEM: AeroBEM_RZGM
• PANEL: AeroSIM_RZGM, AeroSIM+
• CFD: FlowSIM_RZGM
• WindSIM
• ANSYS Fluent
• CFD++
• SU2
• OPENFOAM

DESIGN and NUMERICAL ANALYSIS STUDIES

• Airfoil and Rotor Design and Performance Analyses
• Wind Turbine Rotor CFD Simulations
• Unsteady CFD Simulations:
  • Research: Ship Airwake Unsteady CFD Simulations
    
  • Research: High-Rise Buildings CFD Simulations
    
• Wind Turbine Wake Interactions Aerodynamic Simulations (Panel Methods, CFD)
• Wind Farm CFD Simulations / Wind Resource Simulations
• Numerical Modeling of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs)
  • Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Simulations