Large eddy simulation study of fully developed wind-turbine array boundary layers

By M. Calaf, Charles Meneveau, Johan Meyers. 2010

934 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is well known that when wind turbines are deployed in large arrays, their efficiency decreases due to complex interactions among themselves and with the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). For wind farms whose length exceeds the height of the ABL by over an order of magnitude, a “fully developed” flow regime can be established. In this asymptotic regime, changes in the streamwise direction can be neglected and the relevant exchanges occur in the vertical direction. Such a fully developed wind-turbine array boundary layer (WTABL) has not been studied systematically before. A suite of large eddy simulations (LES), in which wind turbines are modeled using the classical “drag disk” concept, is performed for various wind-turbine arrangements, turbine loading factors, and surface roughness values. The results are used to quantify the vertical transport of momentum and kinetic energy across the boundary layer. It is shown that the vertical fluxes of kinetic energy are of the same order of magnitude as the power...

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81547eb70f819430d60fe887f069d5d510e09e96

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Citations in the corpus

Boundary-layer development and gravity waves in conventionally neutral wind farms (2017, methodology): “In recent years, LES has also been applied to study turbulent flow in and around wind turbines and wind farms (see, e.g. Jimenez et al. 2007, 2008; Calaf et al. 2010; Wu & Porté-Agel 2011).”
The Explicit Wake Parametrisation V1.0: a wind farm parametrisation in the mesoscale model WRF (2015, background): “Besides the changed velocity field around the turbines, there is also evidence that wind turbines affect planetary boundary layer (PBL) processes due to the changed turbulence (Baidya Roy et al., 2004; Calaf et al., 2010; Baidya Roy and Traiteur, 2010; Barrie and KirkDavidoff, 2010; Wang and Prinn, ”
A concurrent precursor inflow method for Large Eddy Simulations and applications to finite length wind farms (2014, methodology): “In our LES code [9, 10] we consider a neutral ABL and solve the filtered incompressible Navier-Stokes (NS) equations and the continuity equation, i.”
Review of computational fluid dynamics for wind turbine wake aerodynamics (2011, methodology): “High-order low-dissipative explicit schemes, such as the standard four-stage Runge–Kutta method, used in Calaf et al. 38 can then be an attractive alternative.”
Large-Eddy Simulation of Wind-Turbine Wakes: Evaluation of Turbine Parametrisations (2011, methodology): “More recently, this approach has also been used in LES together with the traditional Smagorinsky model (Jimenez et al. 2007, 2008) or the Lagrangian scale-dependent dynamic model (Calaf et al. 2010) for the SGS stresses.”
Modelling yawed wind turbine wakes: a lifting line approach (2018, methodology): “…test predictions based on the proposed model in (2.4)–(2.7), numerical simulations of flow around a yawed actuator disk under uniform, laminar inflow are carried out using the pseudo-spectral code LESGO, which was validated in prior works (e.g. Calaf et al. 2010; Stevens, Martínez & Meneveau 2018).”
Optimal smoothing length scale for actuator line models of wind turbine blades based on Gaussian body force distribution (2015, background): “Actuator disk models (ADM) greatly reduce resolution requirements by replacing the rotor by a distributed body force at the rotor disk location [2, 3].”
Overview of the PALM model system 6.0 (2019, methodology): “as proposed by Calaf et al. (2010)) the forces are uniformly distributed and only the thrust force is considered (thus ignoring the torque), the WTM provides an advanced ADM (ADM-R) that considers varying forces over the rotor disk and rotation of the rotor blades, although these are not resolved. T”
Wind-Turbine and Wind-Farm Flows: A Review (2019, methodology): “It is worth mentioning that dispersive stresses are, in general, smaller than the horizontally-averaged shear stresses, but they are not negligible (Cal et al. 2010; Calaf et al. 2010).”
Wakes in very large wind farms and the effect of neighbouring wind farms (2014, background): “Turbines in a large array are known to alter the flow in the atmosphere above the wind farm [1,2].”