Advanced wind energy prediction procedure to include wake interaction effects in assessments
10 Sep 19
5:00 PM
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6:00 PM
Most commercial turbine interaction models nowadays neglect upstream and lateral turbine interactions, referred to as blockage effects, only focusing on wake effects downstream of the machines. To solve this problem, the wind industry has been investigating the use of CFD analysis with actuator disk theory. While such models exist, the wind industry lacks available engineering solutions to include these in a standard software process. ZephyScience identified 4 major issues that are delaying this approach to become a solution: 1. A high number of cells is needed to catch the rotors and solve the wakes accurately. 2. As results are dependent on the reference velocity, many flow velocity situations must be solved for each direction. 3. A significant number of flow directions still have to be solved in order to keep an acceptable level of accuracy. 4. Multiple virtual layout situations must be solved to avoid the upstream influence of the actuator disk, whose properties (thrust, power) depend on freestream wind speed. These issues are all very computationally expensive to overcome. In this presentation, a new energy capture workflow is described and proposed, using Cloud Computing with a high degree of parallelization to make the process possible. The new energy capture process is applied over a few test projects. Results are compared to Park-Jensen wake model results to assess the impact of the actuator disk model and to check the importance of the blockage effect.