A concurrent precursor inflow method for Large Eddy Simulations and applications to finite length wind farms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a concurrent precursor inflow method for Large Eddy Simulations to generate realistic turbulent inflow conditions for wind farm modeling, improving simulation accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel dual-domain approach that eliminates the need for large inflow databases and ensures realistic turbulence structures in wind farm simulations.

Findings

Downstream turbines show reduced power output with aligned inflow.

Method aligns simulation results with field data.

Avoids large data storage and synthetic inflow issues.

Abstract

In order to enable simulations of developing wind turbine array boundary layers with highly realistic inflow conditions a concurrent precursor method for Large Eddy Simulations is proposed. In this method we consider two domains simultaneously, i.e. in one domain a turbulent Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) without wind turbines is simulated in order to generate the turbulent inflow conditions for a second domain in which the wind turbines are placed. The benefit of this approach is that a) it avoids the need for large databases in which the turbulent inflow conditions are stored and the correspondingly slow I/O operations and b) we are sure that the simulations are not negatively affected by statically swept fixed inflow fields or synthetic fields lacking the proper ABL coherent structures. Sample applications are presented, in which, in agreement with field data a strong decrease of the power output of downstream wind-turbines with respect to the first row of wind-turbines is observed for perfectly aligned inflow.