Published In

Physical Review Fluids

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2016

Subjects

Kinetic energy, Wind turbines, Atmospheric models, Boundary layer control

Abstract

An isolated wind turbine and a very large wind farm are introduced into large-eddy simulations of an atmospheric boundary layer. The atmospheric flow is forced with a constant geostrophic wind and a time-varying surface temperature extracted from a selected period of the CASES-99 field experiment. A control volume approach is used to directly compare the transfer of mean kinetic energy around a characteristic wind turbine throughout a diurnal cycle considering both scenarios. For the very large wind farm case, results illustrate that the recovery of mean kinetic energy around a wind turbine is dominated by the vertical flux, regardless of atmospheric stratification. Contrarily, for an isolated wind turbine, the recovery is dependent on the background atmospheric stratification and it is produced by a combination of advection, vertical flux, and pressure redistribution. The analysis also illustrates that during the unstable stratification periods vertical entrainment of mean kinetic energy dominates, whereas during the stable regime horizontal entrainment is predominant. Finally, it is observed that in both scenarios, the single wind turbine and the large wind farm cases, turbulent mixing is driven by the background convective stratification during the unstable period and by the effect of the wind turbine during the stable regime.

Description

This is the publisher's final pdf. Originally published in Physical Review Fluids and is © 2016 American Physical Society and can be found online at: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.1.074402

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevFluids.1.074402

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/19388

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