Impacts of inflow turbulence on the flow past a permeable disk

Abstract

A permeable disk serves as a simplified model for the conversion of wind energy by a horizontal axis wind turbine. In this study, we investigate how inflow turbulence intensity (TI), $I_\infty$ , and inflow turbulence integral length scale, $L_\infty$ , influence the flow recovery in the wake, the capability of a permeable disk in extracting turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) of the incoming flow, and the statistics of wake-added turbulence using large-eddy simulation. The simulated inflows include various TIs (i.e. $I_\infty =2.5\,\%$ – $25\,\%$ ) and integral length scales (i.e. $L_\infty / D =0.5$ – $2.0$ ) for two thrust coefficients. Simulation results show that both inflow TI and integral length scale influence flow recovery via enhanced ejections and sweeps across the wake boundary, with the former strongly affecting the position where the wake starts to recover and the latter mainly on the recovery rate. Moreover, it is shown that increasing $I_\infty$ and $L_\infty$ increases the TKE extraction by the disk, occurring mainly at scales ( $s$ ) greater than $0.5D$ and frequencies depending on the inflow integral length scale. As for the wake-added TKE, the inflow TI mainly affects its intensity, while the inflow integral length scale affects both its intensity and the sensitive frequencies, with the spectral distributions in scale space ( $s$ ) being similar and the peak located around $s/D=1.0$ for the considered inflows.