A Prescribed-Wake Vortex Lattice Method for Preliminary Design of Co-Axial, Dual-Rotor Wind Turbines

This paper extends the prescribed-wake vortex lattice method (VLM) to perform aerodynamic analysis of dual-rotor wind turbines (DRWTs). A DRWT turbine consists of a large, primary rotor placed co-axially behind a smaller, secondary rotor. The additional vortex system introduced by the secondary rotor of a DRWT is modeled while taking into account the singularities that can occur when the trailing vortices from the secondary (upstream) rotor interact with the bound vortices of the main (downstream) rotor. Pseudo-steady assumption is invoked, and averaging over multiple relative rotor positions is performed to account for the primary and secondary rotors operating at different rotational velocities. The VLM solver is first validated against experiments and blade element momentum theory results for a conventional, single-rotor turbine. The solver is then verified for two DRWT designs against results from two computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods: (1) Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes CFD with an actuator disk representation of the turbine rotors and (2) large-eddy simulations with an actuator line model. Radial distributions of sectional torque force and angle of attack show reasonable agreement between the three methods. Results of parametric sweeps performed using VLM agree qualitatively with the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) CFD results demonstrating that the proposed VLM can be used to guide preliminary design of DRWTs.