8th European Postgraduate Fluid Dynamics Conference

6th – 9th July 2016
Warsaw, Poland

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Large-eddy simulations of a wind turbine wake above a forest

Josef Schröttle1, Zbigniew Piotrowski2
1Institute for Atmospheric Physics, German Aerospace Center (DLR)
2Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMGW), Warsaw
Since the pioneering large-eddy simulations of Shaw and Schumann (1992), the forest stands have been treated as a porous body of horizontally uniform (leaf) area density with constant drag coefficient. This approach is sometimes called field-scale approach. Current finer scale applications and field campaigns consider the heterogeneity of the canopies at the plant-scale (Schrottle and Dornbrack 2013). We present results from plant-scale simulations of flow through resolved tree structures originating from laser scans. Simulating the wake of one wind turbine, e.g., above a forest requires a new computational approach. For this purpose, EULAG (Prusa et al. 2008) is modified to accommodate two independent hydrodynamic solvers. The two solvers are integrated simultaneously. The turbulence structure above a forest is simulated in the first solver at the field scale and acts as inflow for the wind turbine wake
Keywords: Geophysical flows, Computational methods, Turbulence