Characterization of wind turbine wakes in a non-sheared turbulent flow

• The characteristics of the turbulence field in wakes produced by horizontal-axis wind turbines under a uniform inflow are studied. To this aim, LES simulations of a rotor subjected to different types of inflow are performed with OpenFOAM. Two different Actuator Disk (AD) models for the rotor are implemented with the goal of assessing their capabilities to reproduce the turbulence characteristics of the wake: a uniformly loaded rotor and an AD model based on the blade element theory that employs tabulated airfoil data to calculate the distribution of forces over the disk as well as the geometry and other physical parameters from a conceptual 5 MW offshore wind turbine. The latter AD implementation makes use of a control system to adjust the rotational velocity of the rotor to the conditions of the wind flow.The turbulent wakes produced by the two AD models are analyzed over three different inflow conditions: laminar and two turbulent inflows of intensities 3.2 % and 6.7 % measured at the location of the rotor when the turbine is not present. The turbulence is pre-generated using the Mann model, that produces turbulent fields with the same second order statistics of the atmospheric turbulence. The turbulence is introduced in the computational domain at a position ahead of the rotor instead of at the inlet, to minimize its decay as it is convected downstream in the domain.A study of the turbulence evolution in the absence of the rotor reveals a discrepancy between the values of the turbulence intensity of the pre-generated field when it is measured before and after it has been introduced in the computational domain. This in turn suggests a numerical issue caused by imposing a turbulent velocity field in the flow. However, once the turbulence is introduced, it is found to exhibit a very small decay as the flow moves downstream.The simulations of the turbulent wake show differences in the turbulence characteristics of the near wake of each AD model. We also observe a dissimilar behaviour of the turbulence intensity along the wake for the different inflow conditions which difficult the task of determining a conclusive trend. Nonetheless, the results show that the turbulence characteristics in the far wake are nearly independent of the AD model or the inflow turbulence characteristics.This new implementation of the AD techniques and the use of the Mann method in OpenFOAM can be also proved useful in the future when comparing with the results of similar studies for which other CFD platforms are used.

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