OffWindSolver: Wind farm design tool based on actuator line/actuator disk concept in OpenFoam architecture

Abstract

Wind energy is a good alternative to meet the energy requirements in some parts of the world; however the efficiency of wind farm depends on the optimized location of the wind turbines. Therefore a software tool that is capable of predicting the in-situ performance of multiple turbine installations in different operating conditions with reliable accuracy is needed. In present study wind farm layout design tool OffWindSolver is developed within the OpenFoam architecture. Unsteady PisoFoam solver is extended to account for wind turbines, where each turbine is modeled as a sink term in the momentum equation. Turbine modeling is based on actuator line concepts derived from SOWFA code, where each blade of the turbine is represented as a line. The loading on each line/blade of the turbine is estimated using the Blade Element Method (BEM). The inputs for the solver are tabulated airfoil aerodynamic data, dimension and height of the wind turbines, wind magnitude and direction. OffWindSolver is validated for a real wind farm-Lillgrund offshore facility in Sweden/Denmark operated by Vattenfall Vindkraft AB. Because of the scale of the computation, we only examine the effect of wind from one direction at one speed. In the absence of time dependent Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer (MABL), a log wind profile with surface roughness of 0.04 is used at the inlet. The simulated power production of each turbine is compared to the field data and large-eddy simulation. The overall power of the wind farm is well predicted. The simulation shows the significant decreases of the power for those turbines that were in the wake.