A grid deformation method for wind turbine CFD applications

The desire for low cost of energy is driving the development of modern wind turbines toward more and more flexible designs. With respect to aerodynamic evaluation of these designs based on CFD this pose a requirement for the capability to compute the flow on deforming grids around heavily deforming geometries. The present paper describes an efficient explicit method suited for deforming geometries in a structured grid approach, here illustrated for airfoil and a wind turbine rotor simulations. Based on the present investigation, it is illustrated that the solution on the deformed grids deviates less than a fraction of a percent from the solution on the original grids both for the airfoil and the rotor case.