Determination of wind turbine far wake using actuator disk

Abstract

The growth in size of wind turbines over the last years is significant. The rotor diameter becomes somehow comparable to atmospheric boundary layer at the land surface. In this case the assumption of uniform velocity of upcoming wind cannot be valid. The aim of this paper is to create a simplified model of wind turbine rotor which can represent the aerodynamic inter-action of atmospheric boundary layer with a horizontal axis wind turbine. Such model will be also useful for the study of optimal placement of wind turbines in a wind farm when a large number of calculations is needed and when the time required for full CFD calculations be-comes prohibitive. In this study we adopt actuator disk model which takes in account with sufficient precision the influence of blade geometry on wind turbine aerodynamic performance. The proposed actuator disk model is tested in the case of horizontal axis wind turbine using wall-modelled large eddy simulation. The obtained results of aerodynamic performance and wake show the rapidity of calculation and the reliability of proposed approach.