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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Large organized arrays of wind turbines, known as “wind farms” or “wind parks”, stretching severalkilometers in the horizontal extent and containing hundreds of turbines are the state-of-the art method for harvesting wind energy from the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and converting it to electrical power. The interaction of the multiple wind turbines with each other through the atmospheric turbulence is extremely complicated due to the disparate length scales imposed by the geometry of the wind farm, wind turbine rotors and the high Reynolds number (Re ~ 108 - 1012 ) of the flow and is quite different than the behavior of the single turbine in ABL.
In this presentation, we study the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of massive wind farms and finite sized wind turbine arrays in order to understand the large scales of motion, how they are being modulated and their scaling laws, which are involved in the power generation from the turbines. The computation and the LES modeling have been carried using higher order spectral element research code Nek5000. We have used Fourier and wavelet spectral methods as well as novel POD tools to understand the dynamics of the length scales. The presentation will further illustrate towards a realistic design of windfarms using inflow-outflow boundary conditions. The inflow conditions are being fed by the atmospheric precursor model and we also incorporate large scale geophysical phenomenon like,“variable wind mass flux”, “wind veering” due the topography from LIDAR field scans that cannotnaturally evolve from a wall bounded turbulence in an LES framework.
Acknowledgements: This work is supported by U.S. National Science Foundation Grant CBET – 13358568 and computing hours from XSEDE supercomputers: Gordon, Comet and Stampede.
Host: Michael Chertkov