Effect of varying fidelity turbine models on wake loss prediction

Abstract

Wind farm simulations are widely used in estimating energy yield and for optimal wind farm layout design. In the early design stages of a wind farm, low fidelity wind turbine models are used to estimate the farm power output, often due to incomplete knowledge of the turbine characteristics and the additional complexities. The discrepancies introduced in a wind farm simulation as a result of using low fidelity models can often be overlooked, leading to a misrepresentation of a wind farm's yield. In this paper, the discrepancies between five levels of fidelity for two turbine designs are quantified, focusing on the produced wake and the downstream flow effects. Two high fidelity aeroelastic turbine models and three low fidelity models are described, where the wake is produced using the Dynamic Wake Meandering (DWM) model for each turbine and model. The results provide insight into the expected uncertainties in wake simulations as a result of changing the turbine fidelity level.