Code-to-code-to-experiment validation of LES-ALM wind farm simulators

Abstract

The aim of this work is to present a detailed code-to-code comparison of two Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) solvers. Corresponding experimental measurements are used as a reference to validate the quality of the CFD simulations. The comparison highlights the effects of solver order on the solutions, and it tries to answer the question of whether a high order solver is necessary to capture the main characteristics of a wind farm. Both solvers were used on different grids to study their convergence behavior. While both solvers show a good match with experimental measurements, it appears that the low order solver is more accurate and substantially cheaper in terms of computational cost.

How realistic are the wakes of scaled wind turbine models?

“…In fact, since wakes represent a major form of coupling within a wind plant, understanding their behavior and accurately simulating their effects are today problems of central importance in wind energy science, with direct practical implications on design, operation and maintenance. Recent studies include the analysis of single and multiple interacting wakes -see, for example, the review in Bottasso and Campagnolo (2021) or, among others, Whale et al (1996), Porté-Agel (2009, 2010), Bartl and Saetran (2016), Bastankhah and Porté-Agel (2016), Tian et al (2018), Campagnolo et al (2016), Bottasso et al (2014a), Campagnolo et al (2020), Wang et al (2020c) and references therein.…”