Abstract

LES of wind turbine modelling in farms and atmospheric conditions

Author(s): Steffan Ivannel

Introduction: The trend today is to erect wind farms in more and more complex sites. In Scandinavia that commonly implies that the turbines are erected in forested sites and sometimes in combination with complex orography. The challenge to model the turbines, to a detailed level that is sufficient to investigate flow interaction between turbines, acting inside a wind farm combined with the need of modelling the atmospheric flow is of great challenge due to the fact that the range of scales to resolve is large. The work presented here will illustrate state-of-the-art simulations of wind turbines acting in wind farms and complex atmospheric boundary layers and comparison with high quality measurements. The simulation result is based on LES. The presentation will discuss and illustrate to what extent accuracy is reached considering different scales as well as novel effective numerical approaches using Lattice Boltzmann approaches.

Conclusion: The results will show that in complex sites the fetch, i.e., footprint, of the flow acting on wind turbines is of great importance. Therefore, the balance between numerical resolution and area to include in the modelling is of great importance to reach as accurate results as possible.