CFD and Experimental Studies on Wind Turbines in Complex Terrain by Improved Actuator Disk Method

Abstract

In this paper, an onshore wind farm in mountainous area of southwest China was investigated through numerical and experimental methods. An improved actuator disk method, taking rotor data (i.e. blade geometry information, attack angle, blade pitch angle) into account, was carried out to investigate the flow characteristic of the wind farm, especially the wake developing behind the wind turbines. Comparing to the classic AD method and the situ measurements, the improved AD shows better agreements with the measurements. The turbine power was automatically predicted in CFD by blade element method, which agreed well with the measurement results. The study proved that the steady CFD simulation with improved actuator disk method was able to evaluate wind resource well and give good balance between computing efficiency and accuracy, in contrary to much more expensive computation methods such as actuator-line/actuator-surface transient model, or less accurate methods such as linear velocity reduction wake model.