Abstract
The turbulence in the interior of a wind farm is simulated using large eddy simulation and the actuator line technique implemented in the Navier–Stokes equations. The simulations are carried out for an infinitely long row of turbines simulated by applying cyclic boundary conditions at the inlet and outlet. The simulations investigate the turbulence inherent to the wind turbines as no ambient turbulence or shear is added to this idealised case. The simulated data give insight into the performance of the wind turbines operating in the wake of others as well as details on key turbulent quantities. One of the key features of wakes behind wind turbines is the dynamic wake meandering, which is shown to be related to the wind turbine spacing and the vortex shedding from the turbine as a bluff body. The flow is analysed and reconstructed by applying proper orthogonal decomposition.
Acknowledgements
The present work has been carried out with the support of the Danish Council for Strategic Research for the project ‘Center for Computational Wind Turbine Aerodynamics and Atmospheric Turbulence’ (grant 2104-09-067216/DSF) (COMWIND) (http://www.comwind.mek.dtu.dk/Partners.aspx) and the Nordic Consortium on Optimization and Control of Wind Farms (http://picard.hgo.se/~nordwind/), which has provided access to the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) in Sweden.