Analysis of the Airflow Field around a Steep, Three-dimensional Isolated Hill with Commercially Available CFD Software

The present study compared the prediction accuracy of two CFD software packages for simulating a flow around a three-dimensional, isolated hill with a steep slope: 1) Meteodyn WT (turbulence model: k-L RANS), which is one of the leading commercially available CFD software packages in the wind power industry and 2) RIAM-COMPACT【○!R】 (turbulence model: the standard Smagorinsky LES), which has been developed by the lead author of the present paper. Although the Reynolds number settings differed between the simulation with Meteodyn WT and that with RIAM-COMPACT【○!R】, distinct differences in the flow patterns were identified in the vicinity of the isolated hill (especially downstream of the isolated hill) between the flows simulated by the two CFD software packages.