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Section: Application Domains
Energy conversion
We apply the methods developed in our team to the domain of wind engineering and sea-wave converters. In Figure 1, we show results of a numerical model for a sea-wave energy converter. We here rely on a monolithic model to describe the interaction between the rigid floater, air and water; material properties such as densities, viscosities and rigidity vary across the domain. The appropriate boundary conditions are imposed at interfaces that arbitrarily cross the grid using adapted schemes built thanks to geometrical information computed via level set functions [43]. The background method for fluid-structure interface is the volume penalization method [25] where the level set functions is used to improve the degree of accuracy of the method [3] and also to follow the object. The underlined mathematical model is unsteady, and three dimensional; numerical simulations based on a grid with degrees of freedom are executed in parallel using 512 CPUs .
In the context of the Aerogust (Aeroelastic gust modelling) European project, together with Valorem, we investigated the behavior of wind turbine blades under gust loading. The aim of the project was to optimize the design of wind turbine blades to maximize the power extracted. A meteorological mast (Figure 2(a)) has been installed in March 2017 in Brittany to measure wind on-site: data provided by the mast have been exploited to initialize the mathematical model. Due to the large cost of the full-order mathematical model, we relied on a simplified model [35] to optimize the global twist. Then, we validated the optimal configuration using the full-order Cartesian model based on the NaSCar solver. Figure 2(b) shows the flow around the optimized optimized wind turbine rotor.
