ECCOMAS 2024

Meso-microscale coupled modelling of wind resource over complex terrain wind farm

  • Song, Yilei (NUAA)
  • Ma, Guolin (NUAA)
  • Zhao, Ning (NUAA)
  • Tian, Linlin (NUAA)

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Due to the rapid deployment of wind energy, most newly constructed wind turbines are built on varied terrains to take advantage of topographic flow enhancement. During this process, other terrain-induced flow phenomena in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) would affect the performance of wind turbine as well as their wake characteristics. Thus, prior to wind farm construction, the wind resource assessment and wind turbine wake behavior evaluation in the complex terrain are become increasingly crucial for wind energy projects. However, knowledge on these issues is still limited. In the complex wind farm, a highly unsteady and multi-scale coupling phenomenon exists, with the largest vortices being on the scale of kilometers while the smallest vortices are on the scale of millimeters. Under such circumstances, numerical simulation is a powerful tool to help understand the temporal-spatial characteristics and mechanism behind the complex wind phenomenon. Thus, the coupling of mesoscale and microscale simulation method, which is designed to predict the spatial changes in the multi-scale turbulent wind flow, becomes a promising way in the wind energy research. In this work, a meso-microscale coupling methodology is developed and used to investigate wind characteristics under varying atmospheric stabilities over complex terrain. In which, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model is used to mesoscale meteorology simulation, meanwhile the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) method is employed to capture transient turbulent flow structures, which are important features of the ABL that interact with turbine wakes. The coupling methodology uses time-varying flow outputs from the mesoscale WRF model as boundaries for the microscale LES model. With Askervein hill and Blound island as test cases, the coupled simulation performs well at reproducing the vertical profiles of averaged wind speed. With atmosphere gets more stable, shear patterns get more pronounced. In the contrast, surface layer is more well-mixed under convective stabilities.