The swirl of air behind a wind turbine
immc | Louvain-la-Neuve
This image depicts the vorticity magnitude in the wake of a large wind turbine operating in realistic turbulent wind conditions. Each blade produces a vortex tube that is shed from its tip, giving rise to a near wake characterized by a helicoidal configuration. Further downstream, the vortex tubes start to break down under the influence of the ambient wind turbulence, resulting in a chaotic flow. As a consequence, any turbine placed downstream would experience a slower but more turbulent wind. This picture is the result of a Large Eddy Simulation that ran on 4096 cores for 96 hours.