Numerical simulations of wake interaction between two wind turbines at various inflow conditions

Abstract

The phenomenon of wake interaction between two wind turbines was analysed using the actuator line technique and full unsteady Navier-Stokes computations. Results are presented for varying mutual distances between the two turbines and both full wake and half wake situations were considered. Furthermore, simulations were carried out at different degrees of ambient turbulence intensity representing laminar, offshore and onshore conditions. From the simulations, the main characteristics of the interacting wakes were extracted including the averaged velocity and turbulence fi elds as well as the development of wake generated vortex structures. Moreover, the infl uence of the wake of the upstream turbine on the external aerodynamic loading on the blades of the downstream turbine was studied.

Thek-ε-fPmodel applied to double wind turbine wakes using different actuator disk force methods

“…The spacing in the Mann turbulence box is D/8 in all directions. Details of the application of Mann turbulence in wind turbine wake simulations can be found in the work of Troldborg et al [5,36]. It should be noted that the cell spacings in the wake domain are twice as large as used in previous work [6], hence, a large reduction in computational effort is achieved.…”

Simulation of wind turbine wakes using the actuator line technique

“…The concept enables the detail of the wake dynamics and the tip vortices and their influence on the induced velocities in the rotor plane to be studied. The AL and similar models have in the past decade made it possible to compute wake interaction, turbulent flow fields in wind farms and the interaction between wind farms and the atmospheric boundary layer [13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”

Simulating effects of a wind‐turbine array using LES and RANS

“…In LES models, turbines may be represented with actuator-disk models, which represent the turbine rotor as a solid body, or more computationally expensive actuator-line models [Churchfield et al, 2012a], which represent the effect of each individual turbine blade. These turbine parameterizations have been used to analyze wake turbulence [Jimenez et al, 2007[Jimenez et al, , 2008, the wind speed deficit within offshore wakes [Barthelmie et al, 2006;Vollmer et al, 2015], tip vortices in the wake caused by blade rotation [Troldborg et al, 2010], stability impacts on wakes [Troldborg et al, 2011;Lu and Port e-Agel, 2011;Mirocha et al, 2014;Aitken et al, 2014;Bhaganagar and Debnath, 2014], wake effects on surface fluxes [Calaf et al, 2011], and variations in wind turbine layout [Meyers and Meneveau, 2012;Archer et al, 2013].…”