CFD modeling and analysis of wind Turbine wakes

Abstract

In modern applications wind turbines are often clustered into farms newlineto produce large amounts of energy for neighboring populations or industries newlineHowever in this exercise one must keep in mind that the efficiency of a newlinegiven turbine is greatly affected by the machine s upwind of it It is well newlineknown from the basic concepts of the conservation of energy that if kinetic newlineenergy is extracted from the wind the wind flowing downstream of a wind newlineturbine will have a lower velocity compared to the velocity upstream of the newlinewind turbine It is consequently necessary to model the wind turbine wake in newlineorder to estimate how much energy is available for the downstream wind newlineturbines and how much power the wind turbines can produce as the power newlineoutput of a wind turbine scales cubically with the wind speed available for the newlinerotor disk In such a case in order to achieve the highest possible efficiency newlinefrom the wind and to install as many wind turbines as possible within a newlinelimited area it becomes a necessity to study the wakes developed by the wind newlineturbines newlineThe numerical solution of the flow through a wind turbine has newlinebecome increasingly useful since it helps in reducing the time required for newlinethe design and analysis and the cost in wind turbine development The newlineanalysis of such complex flow fields requires a more physics based approach newlinesuch as that provided by Computational Fluid Dynamics CFD newline newline