Integration of atmospheric stability in wind resource assessment through multi-scale coupling method

Abstract

The abundance level of wind resources is the first and most important factor to consider in the wind farm design. The accuracy of wind energy resource assessment directly determines the operating income of a wind farm after its construction is completed. Therefore, aiming to meet the requirements of accurate wind resource assessment in areas with a complex terrain or those lacking the observation information, this paper proposes a multi-scale coupling numerical simulation method based on atmospheric stability. First, the atmospheric flow field simulation results at the heights of 200 m, 300 m, and 400 m are extracted from the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and used as inlet boundary conditions of a microscale Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. Then, to obtain more accurate coupling data at the height of a wind turbine hub, the atmospheric stability parameter is introduced into the multi-scale coupling process, data correction is conducted at the three heights, and a comparison with the observation data of a wind tower is made. Finally, a numerical analysis is conducted using real data of a wind farm in eastern Inner Mongolia and Jilin. The analysis results show that the proposed method can improve the assessing accuracy of wind resources of wind farms using mesoscale data, which is valuable to a certain extent in real-world applications.