An improved dynamic model for wind-turbine wake flow

Abstract

We present an improved dynamic model to predict the time-varying characteristics of the far-wake flow behind a wind turbine. Our model, based on the FAST.Farm engineering model, is novel in that it estimates the turbulence generated by convective instabilities, which selectively amplifies the inflow velocity fluctuations. Our model also incorporates scale dependence when calculating the wake meandering induced by the passive wake meandering mechanism. For validation, our model is compared with FAST.Farm and large-eddy simulation (LES). For the mean flow, our model agrees well with LES in terms of the wake deficit and wake width, but the FAST.Farm model underestimates the former and overestimates the latter. For the instantaneous flow, our model predicts well the wake-center deflection and turbulent kinetic energy, reducing the discrepancies in the spectral characteristics by more than a factor of two relative to LES, depending on the Strouhal number. By incorporating two key mechanisms governing the far-wake dynamics, our model can predict more accurately the dynamic wake evolution, making it suitable for real-time calculations of wind farm performance.