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Impact of Neutral Boundary-Layer Turbulence on Wind-Turbine Wakes: A Numerical Modelling Study

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Abstract

The wake characteristics of a wind turbine in a turbulent boundary layer under neutral stratification are investigated systematically by means of large-eddy simulations. A methodology to maintain the turbulence of the background flow for simulations with open horizontal boundaries, without the necessity of the permanent import of turbulence data from a precursor simulation, was implemented in the geophysical flow solver EULAG. These requirements are fulfilled by applying the spectral energy distribution of a neutral boundary layer in the wind-turbine simulations. A detailed analysis of the wake response towards different turbulence levels of the background flow results in a more rapid recovery of the wake for a higher level of turbulence. A modified version of the Rankine–Froude actuator disc model and the blade element momentum method are tested as wind-turbine parametrizations resulting in a strong dependence of the near-wake wind field on the parametrization, whereas the far-wake flow is fairly insensitive to it. The wake characteristics are influenced by the two considered airfoils in the blade element momentum method up to a streamwise distance of 14D (D = rotor diameter). In addition, the swirl induced by the rotation has an impact on the velocity field of the wind turbine even in the far wake. Further, a wake response study reveals a considerable effect of different subgrid-scale closure models on the streamwise turbulent intensity.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Mark Zagar for providing the airfoil data of the 10 MW reference wind turbine from DTU and Fernando Porté-Agel for the constructive discussion on our work in a previous state. This research was performed as part of the LIPS project, funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety by a resolution of the German Federal Parliament. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (http://www.gauss-centre.eu) for funding this project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer SuperMUC at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ, www.lrz.de).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, DLR Oberpfaffenhofen, Weßling, Germany

    Antonia Englberger & Andreas Dörnbrack

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  1. Antonia Englberger
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  2. Andreas Dörnbrack
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Correspondence to Antonia Englberger.

Appendix: BEM Parameters

Appendix: BEM Parameters

See Table 5.

Table 5 List of the BEM method parameters used in parametrization of type B (10 MW reference wind turbine from DTU) (Mark Zagar (Vestas), personal communication, 2015) and type C (three-blade GWS/EP-6030x3 rotor) (Wu and Porté-Agel 2011)
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Englberger, A., Dörnbrack, A. Impact of Neutral Boundary-Layer Turbulence on Wind-Turbine Wakes: A Numerical Modelling Study. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 162, 427–449 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-016-0208-z

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