Wind-Turbine and Wind-Farm Flows: A Review.

Wind energy, together with other renewable energy sources, are expected to grow substantially in the coming decades and play a key role in mitigating climate change and achieving energy sustainability. One of the main challenges in optimizing the design, operation, control, and grid integration of wind farms is the prediction of their performance, owing to the complex multiscale two-way interactions between wind farms and the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). From a fluid mechanical perspective, these interactions are complicated by the high Reynolds number of the ABL flow, its inherent unsteadiness due to the diurnal cycle and synoptic-forcing variability, the ubiquitous nature of thermal effects, and the heterogeneity of the terrain. Particularly important is the effect of ABL turbulence on wind-turbine wake flows and their superposition, as they are responsible for considerable turbine power losses and fatigue loads in wind farms. These flow interactions affect, in turn, the structure of the ABL and the turbulent fluxes of momentum and scalars. This review summarizes recent experimental, computational, and theoretical research efforts that have contributed to improving our understanding and ability to predict the interactions of ABL flow with wind turbines and wind farms.

Shifts in wind energy potential following land-use driven vegetation dynamics in complex terrain.

Many mountainous regions with high wind energy potential are characterized by multi-scale variabilities of vegetation in both spatial and time dimensions, which strongly affect the spatial distribution of wind resource and its time evolution. To this end, we developed a coupled interdisciplinary modeling framework capable of assessing the shifts in wind energy potential following land-use driven vegetation dynamics in complex mountain terrain. It was applied to a case study area in the Romanian Carpathians. The results show that the overall shifts in wind energy potential following the changes of vegetation pattern due to different land-use policies can be dramatic. This suggests that the planning of wind energy project should be integrated with the land-use planning at a specific site to ensure that the expected energy production of the planned wind farm can be reached over its entire lifetime. Moreover, the changes in the spatial distribution of wind and turbulence under different scenarios of land-use are complex, and they must be taken into account in the micro-siting of wind turbines to maximize wind energy production and minimize fatigue loads (and associated maintenance costs). The proposed new modeling framework offers, for the first time, a powerful tool for assessing long-term variability in local wind energy potential that emerges from land-use change driven vegetation dynamics over complex terrain. Following a previously unexplored pathway of cause-effect relationships, it demonstrates a new linkage of agro- and forest policies in landscape development with an ultimate trade-off between renewable energy production and biodiversity targets. Moreover, it can be extended to study the potential effects of micro-climatic changes associated with wind farms on vegetation development (growth and patterning), which could in turn have a long-term feedback effect on wind resource distribution in mountainous regions.

Advective velocity and energy dissipation rate in an oscillatory flow.

Characterizing the transport processes at the sediment-water interface along sloping boundaries in lakes and reservoirs is of fundamental interest in lake and reservoir water quality management. The turbulent bottom boundary layer (TBBL) along a slope, induced by the breaking of internal waves in a linearly stratified fluid, was investigated through laboratory measurements. Fast response micro-scale conductivity and temperature probes in conjunction with laser-Doppler velocimetry were used to measure the time series of salinity, temperature, and velocity along a sloping boundary. Turbulent energy spectra were computed from the velocity data using a time-dependent advective velocity and Taylor's hypothesis. The energy spectra were used to estimate the energy dissipation rate at different positions in the TBBL. The advective velocity in this near-zero mean shear flow is based on an integral time scale (T(int)). The integral time scale is related to the average frequency of the spectral energy density of the flow velocity. The energy dissipation rate estimated from the variable advective velocity with an averaging time window equal to the integral time scale (T=T(int)) was 43% higher than the energy dissipation rate estimated from a constant advective velocity. The estimated dissipation rates with T=T(int) were comparable to values obtained by curve-fitting a theoretical Batchelor spectrum for the temperature gradient spectra. This study proposes the integral time scale to be used for the oscillatory flows as (a) a time-averaging window to estimate the advective velocity and associated energy dissipation level, and (b) a normalizing parameter in the energy spectrum.

Synthetic turbulence, fractal interpolation, and large-eddy simulation.

Fractal interpolation has been proposed in the literature as an efficient way to construct closure models for the numerical solution of coarse-grained Navier-Stokes equations. It is based on synthetically generating a scale-invariant subgrid-scale field and analytically evaluating its effects on large resolved scales. In this paper, we propose an extension of previous work by developing a multiaffine fractal interpolation scheme and demonstrate that it preserves not only the fractal dimension but also the higher-order structure functions and the non-Gaussian probability density function of the velocity increments. Extensive a priori analyses of atmospheric boundary layer measurements further reveal that this multiaffine closure model has the potential for satisfactory performance in large-eddy simulations. The pertinence of this newly proposed methodology in the case of passive scalars is also discussed.