Simulation of turbulent wakes in model wind farm with arbitrary location for wind turbines

Abstract

Wind energy is an important part of renewable energy sources in the Russian Federation. A new modern wind farm with 28 wind turbines was built on the territory of the Russian Federation, in the Ulyanovsk region in 2017-2018. When designing and operating a wind farm, it is necessary to assess correctly the power of each individual wind turbine. In this paper we used the open SOWFA library based on OpenFOAM 2.4.0 and URANS approach with k-e model of turbulence. The Actuator Line Model for the calculation of the forces from the wind turbines was used in pisoFoamTurbine.ALM solver. To set the boundary conditions at the input, the Precursor method was used. The unstructured grids with different number of cells were built. As a result of the calculation for 14 simulators of wind turbines, the values of the power coefficients Cp and thrust coefficients Ct were also determined. The maximum Cp value was in agreement with the Bets-Zhukovsky law for an ideal wind turbine. The new numerical case with 28 wind turbines was prepared for future simulations. The calculations were performed on a cluster of the UNICFD web-laboratory of ISP RAS. Each calculation was performed on 48-72 cpu cores.