Assessment of URANS and LES Methods in Predicting Wake Shed Behind a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

In order to shed light on the Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT) wake characteristics, in this paper we present high-fidelity CFD simulations of the flow around an exemplary H-shaped VAWT turbine, and we propose to apply Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) to the computed flow field in the near wake of the rotor. The turbine under consideration was widely studied in previous experimental and computational investigations. In the first part of the study, multiple Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations were performed at the Tip Speed Ratio (TSR) of peak power coefficient, to select the most accurate turbulence model with respect to available data. In the following step, further RANS numerical simulations were performed at different TSRs to compare the power coefficient against experimental data. Then, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) was applied for multiple TSR conditions. The spatial and temporal POD modes along with modal energy for the RANS and LES results were extracted, and the performance of the turbulence models was assessed. Also, an interpretation of the POD modes with respect to the flow structures was given to highlight the most significant time and length scales of the predictions considering the different dynamical levels of approximations of the computational models.