Abstract
This study investigates the wake interaction of four full-scale three-bladed tidal turbines with different ambient turbulence conditions, in straight and yawed flows. A three-dimensional unsteady Lagrangian Vortex Blob software is used for the numerical simulations of the turbines’ wakes. In order to model the ambient turbulence in the Lagrangian Vortex Method formalism, a Synthetic Eddy Method is used. With this method, turbulent structures are added in the computational domain to generate a velocity field which statistically reproduces any ambient turbulence intensity and integral length scale. The influence of the size of the structures and their density (within the study volume) on the wake of a single turbine is studied. Good agreement is obtained between numerical and experimental results for a high turbulence intensity but too many structures can increase the numerical dissipation and reduce the wake extension. Numerical simulations of the four turbine array with the layout initially proposed for the NEPTHYD pilot farm are then presented. Two ambient turbulence intensities encountered in the Alderney Race and two integral length scales are tested with a straight flow. Finally, the wakes obtained for yawed flows with different angles are presented, highlighting turbine interactions.
Highlights
This paper presented an industrial application of the recent implementation of the SEM (Synthetic Eddy Method) in the Lagrangian Vortex framework, of which the theoretical basis is detailed in Choma Bex et al [32]
The upstream mean velocity, turbulence intensities and integral length scales were chosen from recent published works dedicated to analysing the Alderney Race turbulence characteristics
A four turbine array was simulated and analysed. This array is the reproduction of the NEPTHYD precommercial farm that was granted by the French government in the past year to the consortium composed by Engie-Alstom, just before the Alstom-GE decision to halt tidal energy development
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Crucially for this paper dealing with the Alderney Race, the results of mainly two French research programs (THYMOTE and HYD2M) were published, most of them in a special issue of the Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25] All these works will be extremely valuable for the forthcoming computations applied to farm configurations in the Alderney Race and for the configuration treated in the present paper.
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