Abstract
In wind farms, the wakes of upstream turbines impact the downstream ones in terms of power production, loads, and fatigue. The wake properties depend on many parameters such as the stratification, Coriolis force, large-scale forcing and orography. To simulate this interdependence, the actuator line method (ALM) has been implemented in the atmospheric code Meso-NH, which is an LES research code developed by the French weather services. This implementation has already been validated for the blade force distribution on the NewMexico case (uniform inflow in a wind tunnel) and for the interaction with the atmosphere on the Horns Rev photo case. The work presented here aims at completing the validation in a realistic atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), with a focus on velocity deficit and wake meandering. It is based on the international SWiFT benchmark which compares the results of many numerical models with LiDAR measurements in the wake of a single turbine for three cases of atmospheric stability: neutral, unstable and stable. The good results show the capacity of Meso-NH/ALM to generate realistic wakes in a representative ABL.
Highlights
The wake behind a wind turbine is characterised by a decrease of wind velocity and an increased turbulence intensity (TI) compared to the inflow properties, leading respectively to a decreased generated power and increased unsteady loads for downstream turbines
The unstable case can be considered as a weakly convective case (|ζ| ≈ |Ri| < 0.3 [18]) and the physics should not be too different from the neutral case
The newly implemented actuator line method in Meso-NH has been compared to the in-situ measurements and large eddy simulation (LES) simulations of the SWiFT benchmark
Summary
The wake behind a wind turbine is characterised by a decrease of wind velocity and an increased turbulence intensity (TI) compared to the inflow properties, leading respectively to a decreased generated power and increased unsteady loads for downstream turbines. The wake properties are impacted by the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) in which the turbines are embedded. An accurate description of the ABL is necessary to predict the wake properties. The present work aims at demonstrating that Meso-NH with an actuator line method (ALM) [4] can be used to generate reference wake data for the calibration and validation of analytical models. Meso-NH is a meteorological solver that accounts for the aforementioned phenomena which can affect wind turbine’s wakes. It can either be used in mesoscale or, as in this study, in large eddy simulation (LES) mode
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