Towards a CFD Model for Prediction of Wind Turbine Power Losses due to Icing in Cold Climate

Icing induced power losses is an important issue when operating wind turbines in cold climate. This paper presents a concept of modelling ice accretion on wind turbines using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The modelling concept works towards unifying the processes of modelling ice accretion and the
aerodynamic analysis of the iced object into one CFD-based icing model. Modelling of icing and obtaining ice shapes in combination with mesh update by surface boundary displacement was demonstrated in the paper. It has been done by expressing in-cloud icing in CFD by an Eulerian multiphase model, implementing an icing module into the CFD solution and finally by surface boundary displacement also included in the CFD solution. The model has been developed using ANSYS-FLUENT and user-defined functions. The naca profile, NACA64618, has been used to illustrate the functionality of the model. Running ice accretion for different meteorological boundary conditions has illustrated the capabilities of the model and the generated ice shapes showed agreement with the literature.