A Numerical Study of the Tip Wake of a Wind Turbine Impeller Using Extended Proper Orthogonal Decomposition

The behavior of the tip wake of a wind turbine is one of the hot issues in the wind power field. This problem can partially be tackled using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). However, this approach lacks the ability to provide insights into the spatial structure of important high-order flows. Therefore, with the horizontal axis wind turbine as the main focus, in this work, firstly, we conduct CFD simulations of the wind turbine in order to obtain a data-driven basis relating to multiple working conditions for further analysis. Then, these data are studied using an extended Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) algorithm. The quantitative results indicate that the tip vortex in the wake has a complicated spatio-temporal morphological configuration in the higher-order extended POD space. The radial velocity modes obtained are effective and credible, and such reconstructed flow of the tip vortex becomes clearer with the increase of the reconstruction orders. Interestingly, the changes of relatively high-order correlation coefficients are essentially affected by the periodic fusion of tip and central eddies in the wake.