Comparison of wind farm large eddy simulations using actuator disk and actuator line models with wind tunnel experiments

By Richard J.A.M. Stevens, L. Martínez‐Tossas, Charles Meneveau. 2018

256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We compare wind farm large eddy simulations with the EPFL wind tunnel measurement by Chamorro and Porte-Agel (Bound-Lay. Meteorol. 136, 515 (2010) and Energies 4, 1916 (2011)). We find that the near turbine wake, up to 3 turbine diameters downstream, of a single turbine is captured better with the actuator line method than using the actuator disk method. Further downstream the results obtained with both models agrees very well with the experimental data, confirming findings from previous studies. For large aligned wind farms we find that the actuator disk model predicts the wake profiles behind turbines on the second and subsequent rows more accurately than the wake profile behind the first turbine row. The reason is that the wake layer profile that is created at hub height in very large wind farms is closer to the assumptions made in the actuator disk model than the logarithmic profile found in the inflow conditions. In addition, we show that, even in relatively coarse resolution simulations, adding the effect of the turbine nacelle and tower leads to a significant improvement in the prediction of the near wake features at 1 and 2 diameters downstream.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e28e8d5634066e5b792f1177da6922ce3cf258b

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Citations in the corpus

Wind-Turbine and Wind-Farm Flows: A Review (2019, background): “…studies have demonstrated that, with the appropriate parametrizations, LES can yield accurate simulations of turbulent boundary-layer flow around wind turbines and wind farms (e.g., Wu and Porté-Agel 2011, 2013; Yang et al. 2014c; Xie and Archer 2015; Draper et al. 2016; Stevens et al. 2018).”