Sensitivity to Inlet Conditions of wind resource assessment over complex terrain using three CFD solvers and wind tunnel data

摘要

The variety of commercial and open source CFD codes that are applied for microscale wind modelling is rising in the last years. Its use is becoming more popular, being applied typically to complex terrains where linear models fail. In our work, we focus on the impact of two new sets of inlet conditions for neutral ABL flows. In addition, we analyze the performance of three different CFD solvers; two commercial ones: Fluent v6.3 [1] (probably the most well-known), STAR-CCM+ v5.02.009 [2] and an open source code: OpenFOAM v1.6 [3], whose popularity has increased enormously over the last years both at educational and industry levels. The first step consists on testing the inlet conditions over an empty fetch. Afterwards, the previous conditions are used on a complex terrain. The Test Wind Farm of CENER located on Alaiz mountain in the North of Spain (Pamplona) is chosen. For the time being field measurements were not released, so it was not possible to perform a complete validation. Instead, wind tunnel experiments performed in the 3-m wide L1-B VKI wind tunnel over a 1/5357 scaled model were used as an inter-comparison source of data. The improvement in using more realistic conditions for the turbulent kinetic energy is put into evidence. Similar performance of the three codes was observed.