Coalescing Wind Turbine Wakes
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Statoil, Stavanger (Norway); Bergen Univ., Bergen (Norway). Geophysical Inst.
- Statoil, Stavanger (Norway)
A team of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Statoil used large-eddy simulations to numerically investigate the merging wakes from upstream offshore wind turbines. Merging wakes are typical phenomena in wind farm flows in which neighboring turbine wakes consolidate to form complex flow patterns that are as yet not well understood. In the present study, three 6-MW turbines in a row were subjected to a neutrally stable atmospheric boundary layer flow. As a result, the wake from the farthest upstream turbine conjoined the downstream wake, which significantly altered the subsequent velocity deficit structures, turbulence intensity, and the global meandering behavior. The complexity increased even more when the combined wakes from the two upstream turbines mixed with the wake generated by the last turbine, thereby forming a "triplet" structure. Although the influence of the wake generated by the first turbine decayed with downstream distance, the mutated wakes from the second turbine continued to influence the downstream wake. Two mirror-image angles of wind directions that yielded partial wakes impinging on the downstream turbines yielded asymmetric wake profiles that could be attributed to the changing flow directions in the rotor plane induced by the Coriolis force. In conclusion, the turbine wakes persisted for extended distances in the present study, which is a result of low aerodynamic surface roughness typically found in offshore conditions
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Wind and Water Technologies Office (EE-4W)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 1220754
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/JA-5000-64325
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Physics. Conference Series, Vol. 625, Issue 1; Related Information: Journal of Physics: Conference Series; ISSN 1742-6588
- Publisher:
- IOP PublishingCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
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A Large-Eddy-Simulation Model for the Study of Planetary Boundary-Layer Turbulence
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Solution of the implicitly discretised fluid flow equations by operator-splitting
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journal | January 1986 |
Wake meandering: a pragmatic approach
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journal | July 2008 |
Wind Turbine Wake Characterization from Temporally Disjunct 3-D Measurements
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journal | November 2016 |
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