Development of a Wake Simulator for Wind Energy Analysis

摘要

Wind turbine and, by extension, wind farm performance is significantly impacted by the interaction between turbine generated wakes. These regions of lower wind speed created by the extraction of kinetic energy from the free stream flow by upstream turbines can lead to large losses in potential energy production for wind farms. In order to design a wind farm to take full advantage of the available wind resource, an understanding of wake phenomena must first be established. To address this, a wind turbine wake simulator was developed as part of the Mixed Reality Simulators for Wind Energy Education project, sponsored through the U.S. Department of Education's FIPSE program. Initially, a database of wind turbine and wind farm wakes for a large variety of wind conditions was generated using the commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent. To generate wakes for single turbine cases, a 3D model of a utility-scale Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) was created and simulations were conducted at varying wind speeds. Additional simulations of 2D models at multi-kilometer scale were conducted using simplified arrays of 64 to 72 turbines, in order to examine the scale and intensity of wakes generated by a full wind farm. The simulator software developed then accesses the post-processed data from CFD simulations to create an interactive learning tool for examining wind turbine wake effects. The first version of the simulator is available for download at www.windenergyeducation.org.