Evaluating Global Blockage engineering parametrizations with LES

TL;DR

This study compares analytical models of global blockage effects in wind farms with Large-Eddy Simulations, revealing significant discrepancies and highlighting the importance of farm-ABL interactions over simple turbine induction superpositions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a LES-based dimensional approach to better characterize global blockage effects, surpassing traditional linear superposition models.

Findings

Analytical models underestimate velocity deficits compared to LES.

Discrepancies increase with farm size and lower ABL height.

Farm-ABL interactions dominate the global blockage effect.

Abstract

Under the term global blockage, the cumulative induction of wind turbines in a wind farm has been recently suspected to be responsible for observed overestimations of the energy yield in large-size wind farms. In this paper, the practice of modeling this effect after linear superposition of single turbine inductions, calculated with three of the most recent analytic models, is compared to Large-Eddy-Simulations of wind farms. We compare the models across two different farms, composed of 9 and 49 turbines, with two different heights of the atmospheric boundary layer, 300 and 500 m. The results show hat the differences between the analytical models are negligible while they substantially differ from the LES results. The linear superposition of induction consistently underestimates the velocity deficit in front of the farm with an error that increases as the wind farm size grows and the ABL height decreases. Also, when calculating the power output at the turbines of the farm, all the analytical models considered do not agree with the LES. These comparisons reveal that the farm interactions with the atmospheric boundary layer may highly outclass the turbine induction in determining the extent of the global blockage effect. Therefore, we present a first dimensional approach to the problem based on LES, aimed at simplifying its characterization.