Evaluation of wind flow characteristics by RANS-based numerical site calibration (NSC) method with met-tower measurements and its application to a complex terrain

Abstract

The performance of wind turbines is not only dependent on the wind turbine design itself, but is also dependent on the accurate assessment of wind resources at the installation site. In this paper, the numerical site calibration (NSC) method using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulation was proposed to accurately forecast the wind flow characteristics of wind turbine sites with complex terrains, namely Methil in Scotland, and Haenam in South Korea. From NSC at the Methil and Haenam sites, it was shown that the complicated and vortical flow fields around hills and valleys were captured using the three-dimensional RANS CFD simulation in Ansys CFX software based on a high-resolution scheme with a renormalization group (RNG)-based k-ε turbulence model. It was also shown that topographically induced wind profile and turbulence intensity over a local-scale complex terrain are remarkably dominated by flow separation after passing hills. It was concluded that the proposed NSC method using three-dimensional RANS simulation with a high-resolution scheme was an economically useful method for evaluating wind flow characteristics numerically to assess wind turbine sites with complex terrains and designing the wind farm layout.