Wind resource assessment at mountainous wind farm: Fusion of RANS and vertical multi-point on-site measured wind field data

Abstract

RANS (Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes) has become one of the mainstream methods to determine the wind field in the wind resource assessment of the complex terrain. However, before the simulation of wind field by RANS, defining the inlet boundary condition often depends on user's experience, and lacks of theoretical guidance, which brings great uncertainties to the accuracy of simulation results. In this paper, based on the vertical multi-point wind speed data (including wind direction) obtained from the on-site measurement and the wind speed data simulated by RANS, a data fusion method called the RANS-VMM (Vertical Multi-point on-site Measurement) method is proposed. In this method, through the polar coordinate diagram (PCD) that can express the wind direction and wind profile index at the same time, the vertical multi-point measured wind speed of wind measurement tower and the RANS simulation results are fused via multiple iterations, which can reconstruct the wind field distribution with spatial variability in complex mountainous areas, thus improving the accuracy of wind resource assessment in the complex terrain. The evaluation and verification of the proposed method are conducted through an real wind farm with complex terrain, and the results indicate that the RANS-VMM method can improves the accuracy of wind resource assessment in the complex terrain.