WInc3D: A novel framework for turbulence-resolving simulations of wind farm wake interactions

Abstract

A fast and efficient turbulence-resolving computational framework, dubbed as WInc3D (Wind Incompressible 3-Dimensional solver), is presented and validated in this paper. WInc3D offers a unified, highly scalable, high-fidelity framework for the study of the flow structures and turbulence of wind farm wakes and their impact on the individual turbines' power and loads. Its unique properties lie on the use of higher-order numerical schemes with “spectral-like” accuracy, a highly efficient parallelisation strategy which allows the code to scale up to O(104) computing processors and software compactness (use of only native solvers/models) with virtually no dependence to external libraries. The work presents an overview of the current modelling capabilities along with model validation. The presented applications demonstrate the ability of WInc3D to be used for testing farm-level optimal control strategies using turbine wakes under yawed conditions. Examples are provided for two turbines operating in-line as well as a small array of 16 turbines operating under “Greedy” and “Co-operative” yaw angle settings. These large-scale simulations were performed with up to 8192 computational cores for under 24 hours, for a computational domain discretised with O(109) mesh nodes.