A hybrid method for modelling wake flow of a wind turbine

Abstract

A fast and accurate prediction of the wake of an upwind turbine is very important to quantify the performance of downwind turbines in offshore wind farms, which become larger and larger. The wake flow and dynamics may be quite accurately simulated by high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software but its computational costs are too high, in particular to simulate a long wake flow often required in engineering practice. Therefore, the wake is often modelled by simplified dynamic wake models in design practices. They are computationally efficient but could not catch all physics, depend on pre-specified empirical parameters, and are not suitable for flow near the turbine. This paper proposes a new hybrid method, in which the near wake flow is simulated by a CFD model based on Navier–Stokes equations with the turbine represented by actuator lines while the far wake flow is modelled by an improved simplified CFD-based dynamic wake model. The two models are two-way coupled at a section downwind the turbine. The newly formulated method is validated by the results of full CFD simulations in the whole domain. Its performances are investigated under different conditions. It will be demonstrated that the new method takes considerably less computational time than the full CFD tool to produce similar results.