Analysis and validation of CFD wind farm models in complex terrain. Effects induced by topography and wind turbines

Wind farms have been extensively simulated through engineering models for the estimation of wind speed and power deficits inside wind farms. These models were designed initially for a few wind turbines located in flat terrain. Other models based on the parabolic approximation of Navier Stokes equations were developed, making more realistic and feasible the operational resolution of big wind farms in flat terrain and offshore sites. These models have demonstrated to be accurate enough when solving wake effects for this type of environments. Nevertheless, few analyses exist on how complex terrain can affect the behaviour of wind farm wake flow. Recent numerical studies have demonstrated that topographical wakes induce a significant effect on wind turbines wakes, compared to that on flat terrain. This circumstance has recommended the development of elliptic CFD models which allow global simulation of wind turbine wakes in complex terrain. An accurate simplification for the analysis of wind turbine wakes is the actuator disk technique. Coupling this technique with CFD wind models enables the estimation of wind farm wakes preserving the extraction of axial momentum present inside wind farms. This paper describes the analysis and validation of the elliptical wake model CFDWake 1.0 against experimental data from an operating wind farm located in complex terrain. The analysis also reports whether it is possible or not to superimpose linearly the effect of terrain and wind turbine wakes. It also represents one of the first attempts to observe the performance of engineering models compares in large complex terrain wind farms.

Comparison of turbulence models for the computational fluid dynamics simulation of wind turbine wakes in the atmospheric boundary layer

An elliptic computational fluid dynamics wake model based on the actuator disk concept is used to simulate a wind turbine, approximated by a disk upon which a distribution of forces, defined as axial momentum sources, is applied on an incoming non-uniform shear flow. The rotor is supposed to be uniformly loaded with the exerted forces estimated as a function of the incident wind speed, thrust coefficient and rotor diameter. The model is assessed in terms of wind speed deficit and added turbulence intensity for different turbulence models and is validated from experimental measurements of the Sexbierum wind turbine experiment.

The elliptic model for communication fluxes

In this paper, a model (called the elliptic model) is proposed to estimate the number of social ties between two locations using population data in a similar manner to how transportation research deals with trips. To overcome the asymmetry of transportation models, the new model considers that the number of relationships between two locations is inversely proportional to the population in the ellipse whose foci are in these two locations. The elliptic model is evaluated by considering the anonymous communications patterns of 25 million users from three different countries, where a location has been assigned to each user based on their most used phone tower or billing zip code. With this information, spatial social networks are built at three levels of resolution: tower, city and region for each of the three countries. The elliptic model achieves a similar performance when predicting communication fluxes as transportation models do when predicting trips. This shows that human relationships are influenced at least as much by geography as is human mobility.