Flow in a large wind field with multiple actuators in the presence of constant vorticity

Abstract

Study of wind farms is an area of active research. Researchers have proposed simplified wind farm models that define the wake structure in a wind farm and how they affect the performance of the wind turbines. Interestingly, these models do not take into account an important aspect of fluid flow, i.e., the fluid–structure interaction (FSI) between the turbines and the wind, which has an important role to play. This motivated researchers to implement numerical analysis tools to model the geometry of the wind turbines in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based models of a wind farm in order to better understand the wake structure and study the performance of the wind farms. However, modeling the complex geometry of the blades and the turbines makes these models computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose an FSI methodology which can simplify the blade resolving CFD models and eliminate the requirement for modeling these complex geometries during preliminary engineering phase. As an example, we present simulations of up to three back-to-back wind turbines and compare the results with those obtained from wind engineering software, FLORIS. The proposed methodology demonstrates how the approach can be used to develop a relatively less computationally expensive wind farm model. The approach formulated in this paper follows an intermediate way between the analytical wind farm models and CFD models by introducing modifications to one of the most basic wind farm models (Jensen's model) and using it to develop a simplified CFD model using the decomposed immersed interface method strategy.