Computational Methods for Wind Engineering with Emphasis on Wind Energy

Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Yuri Bazilevs

The rising costs and fluctuating prices of oil and natural gas, as well as their diminishing supplies create the need for cheaper, sustainable alternative energy sources, such as wind. As a result, countries around the world are putting substantial effort into the development of wind energy technologies. These very ambitious wind energy goals put pressure on the wind energy industry research and development to significantly enhance current wind generation capabilities in a short period of time and decrease the associated costs. This calls for transformative concepts and designs (e.g., floating offshore wind turbines) that must be created and analyzed with high-precision methods and tools. These include complex-geometry, 3D, time dependent, multi-physics predictive simulation methods and software that will play an increasingly important role as demands for wind energy grow.

In this minisymposium we envision bringing together experts in computational methods for large-scale fluid and structural mechanics, coupled fluid—structure interaction, uncertainty quantification, and high-performance parallel computing that are interested in tackling the numerical challenges involved in advanced simulation for wind engineering application, focusing on wind energy and wind turbines. We also hope to attract researchers from industry and national labs that specialize in wind engineering and are interested in the development of better analysis and simulation tools for wind energy applications.

We invite abstracts that include, but are not limited to, the following applications to wind energy engineering

- Fluid structure interactions

- Blade mechanics

- Uncertainty quantification

- High performance computing in wind engineering

- Wind inflow turbulence modeling and simulation

- Full scale wind turbine analysis

- Analysis of air turbines

- Wind farm scale analysis

- Blade, nacelle, turbine and tower analysis

- Analysis of composite blade structures

- Analysis of offshore turbines including free-surface flow

- Verification and validation of wind energy simulations