Brief communication: Wind-speed-independent actuator disk control for faster annual energy production calculations of wind farms using computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

A simple wind-speed-independent actuator disk control method is proposed that can be applied to speed up annual energy production calculations of wind farms using Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulations. The new control method allows the user to simulate the effect of different wind speeds in one simulation by scaling a calibrated thrust coefficient curve, while keeping the inflow constant. Since the global flow is not changed, only the local flow around the actuator disks need be recalculated from a previous converged result, which reduces the number of required iterations and computational effort by a factor of about 2-3.