Andreas Bechmann

Identification of severe wind conditions using a Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes solver

The present paper describes the application of a Navier-Stokes solver to predict the presence of severe flow conditions in complex terrain, capturing conditions that may be critical to the siting of wind turbines in the terrain. First it is documented that the flow solver is capable of predicting the flow in the complex terrain by comparing with measurements from two meteorology masts. Next, it is illustrated how levels of turbulent kinetic energy can be used to easily identify areas with severe flow conditions, relying on a high correlation between high turbulence intensity and severe flow conditions, in the form of high wind shear and directional shear which may seriously lower the lifetime of a wind turbine.

How Forest Inhomogeneities Affect the Edge Flow

Most of our knowledge on forest-edge flows comes from numerical and wind-tunnel experiments where canopies are horizontally homogeneous. To investigate the impact of tree-scale heterogeneities (

MEXICO Wind Tunnel and Wind Turbine modelled in CFD

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Canopy structure effects on the wind at a complex forested site

>1 m) on the edge-flow dynamics, the flow in an inhomogeneous forest edge on Falster island in Denmark is investigated using large-eddy simulation. The three-dimensional forest structure is prescribed in the model using high resolution helicopter-based lidar scans. After evaluating the simulation against wind measurements upwind and downwind of the forest leading edge, the flow dynamics are compared between the scanned forest and an equivalent homogeneous forest. The simulations reveal that forest inhomogeneities facilitate flow penetration into the canopy from the edge, inducing important dispersive fluxes in the edge region as a consequence of the flow spatial variability. Further downstream from the edge, the forest inhomogeneities accentuate the canopy-top turbulence and the skewness of the wind-velocity components while the momentum flux remains unchanged. This leads to a lower efficiency in the turbulent transport of momentum within the canopy. Dispersive fluxes are only significant in the upper canopy. Above the canopy, the mean flow is less affected by the forest inhomogeneities. The inhomogeneities induce an increase in the mean wind speed that was found to be equivalent to a decrease in the aerodynamic height of the canopy. Overall, these results highlight the importance of forest inhomogeneities when looking at canopy–atmosphere exchanges in forest-edge regions.

Modelling Wind Turbine Inflow: The Induction Zone

The flow solvers OpenFOAM and EllipSys3D are compared in the case of neutral atmospheric flow over terrain using the test cases of Askervein and Bolund hills. Both solvers are run using the steady-state Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes k– turbulence model. One of the main modeling differences between the two solvers is the wall-function approach. The OpenFOAM v.1.7.1 uses a Nikuradse’s sand roughness model, while EllipSys3D uses a model based on the atmospheric roughness length. It is found that Nikuradse’s model introduces an error dependent on the near-wall cell height. To mitigate this error the near-wall cells should be at least 10 times larger than the surface roughness. It is nonetheless possible to obtain very similar results between EllipSys3D and OpenFOAM v.1.7.1. The more recent OpenFOAM v.2.2.1, which includes the atmospheric roughness length wall-function approach, has also been tested and compared to the results of OpenFOAM v.1.7.1 and EllipSys3D. The numerical results obtained using the same wall-modeling approach in both EllipSys3D and OpenFOAM v.2.1.1 proved to be almost identical. Two meshing strategies are investigated using HypGrid and SnappyHexMesh. The performance of OpenFOAM on SnappyHexMesh-based low-aspect-ratio unstructured meshes is found to be almost an order of magnitude faster than on HypGrid-based structured and high-aspect-ratio meshes. However, proper control of boundary layer resolution is found to be very difficult when the SnappyHexMesh tool is utilized for grid generation purposes. The OpenFOAM is generally found to be 2–6 times slower than EllipSys3D in achieving numerical results of the same order of accuracy on similar or identical computational meshes, when utilization of EllipSys3D default grid sequencing procedures is included.

The fence experiment — a first evaluation of shelter models

The MEXICO Experiment is reproduced in CFD, including the geometry of the wind tunnel and the wind turbine rotor. The wind turbine is modelled both as a full rotor and as an actuator disc. Various questions regarding the wind tunnel effects on the measurements are investigated. As in a previous work carried out without modelling the wind tunnel, the CFD methods are found to give satisfying agreement with the axial velocity deficit in the wake. However, confirming the previous work, the blade loadings estimated from CFD are found to be consistently larger than the one estimated from measurements. In order to investigate further this issue, the loadings estimated from measurement are used with an actuator disc model. This approach gives a too small wake deficit in comparison with the measurements, which tends to agree with the full rotor computation results.

The Bolund Experiment, Part II: Blind Comparison of Microscale Flow Models

The interaction of a wind turbine with the upstream flow-field in complex and flat terrain is studied using Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations with a two equation turbulence closure. The complex site modelled is Perdigao (Portugal), where a turbine is located on one of two parallel running ridges. Simulating various wind directions with and without rotor, the impact of the rotor on the flow-field upstream is determined. This is compared and related to simulations with sheared and uniform inflow. The induction zones forming for these two inflows agree to such an extent, that shear could be interpreted as linear perturbation to the uniform inflow solution. However, for complex terrain this is not the case, as it is highly dependant on flow features caused by the topography and their interaction with the rotor. Separation in the lee of the ridge plays a crucial role, as it dictates the wind turbine wake trajectory which in turn governs the orientation of the induction zone.

Evaluation of the wind direction uncertainty and its impact on wake modeling at the Horns Rev offshore wind farm

We investigated the effect of the canopy description in a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes method based on key flow results from a complex forested site. The canopy structure in RANS is represented trough the frontal area of canopy elements per unit volume, a variable required as input in canopy models. Previously difficult to estimate, this variable can now be easily recovered using aerial LiDAR scans. In this study, three approaches were tested which were all based on a novel method to extract the forest properties from the scans. A first approach used the fully spatial varying frontal area density. In a second approach, the vertical frontal area density variations were ignored, but the horizontally varying forest heights were kept represented. The third approach ignored any variations: the frontal area density was defined as a constant up to a fixed tree height over the whole domain. The results showed significant differences among the cases. The large-scale horizontal heterogeneities produced the largest effect on the variability of wind fields. Close to the surface, specifying more details about the canopy resulted in an increase of x – y area-averaged fields of velocity and turbulent kinetic energy.