Large eddy simulation of wind turbine wakes in prescribed neutral and non-neutral atmospheric boundary layers

Abstract

Large eddy simulation (LES) of an infinitely long wind farm in a fully developed flow is carried out based on solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The wind turbines are modeled as equivalent rotating actuator disks by applying aerodynamic loads on the flow field using tabulated aerodynamic lift and drag coefficients to save computational time. As a substitute to standard wall modeling LES, a "prescribed mean shear" profile (hereafter called PMS) approach has been implemented and analysed for generating the desired turbulent shear flow. It is applied on Neutral, Stable and Convective atmospheric boundary layers in presence of the -actuator disc represented- wind turbines and qualitatively meaningful results of mean and fluctuating velocity field is obtained. The effect of four different sub-grid scale (SGS) models on the flow structure is investigated and it is seen that subgrid scale modeling (in particular, the Mix-O and Smagorinsky models) improves the accuracy of the simulations. An optimal grid resolution is also proposed for this kind of simulation.