Scale-resolving simulations of atmosphere / wind farm interactions

由于发电成本的稳步下降，海上风能正在实现巨大的增长，现在人们认识到这对2050年净零目标至关重要。大部分的成本降低来自于使用非常大的涡轮机。预计更大的转子将进一步提高效率，但这种巨大风力涡轮机的有效设计和操作带来了一些基本的工程挑战。涡轮机分离和运行的现行设计规则（与转子直径成比例）需要重新审视，这就要求更好地理解不同大气条件、运动和变形转子及其尾流之间的动态相互作用。这种调查需要通过计算机模拟进行，使用模型，解决在农场规模的湍流大气条件，并在转子水平的本地动态效应。在最近的EPSRC/NERC资助项目中，我们已经构建了这样的仿真框架（1），并证明了其适用于超大型计算架构上的农场规模仿真。尾流转向是涡轮机与来流的受控不对准，以修改其尾流对下游涡轮机的影响。已经在小规模农场（2）中表明，这种合作策略可以在电力生产中具有有益的整体优势，但是在尾流物理学、它们与大气条件的依赖性（例如，湿度和温度）及其与转子的相互作用，以便在新的风力发电场开发中采用这种有前途的技术。这将在本项目中得到解决，该项目将对大气条件、转子偏航策略、预期功率输出和叶片动态载荷之间的独立性进行系统研究。这些信息将为叶片/齿轮箱疲劳模型提供信息，以评估功率输出增益和使用寿命缩短之间的潜在权衡。该项目已被定义为与SSE可再生能源作为工业合作伙伴的CASE博士研究生项目。SSE Renewables将主持学生并参与问题的定义和结果的评估。通过与SSE Renewables在该项目上的合作，我们将能够研究SSE Renewables管理的大型风电场在不同大气条件下的各种转子偏航策略。

Offshore wind energy is seeing huge growth thanks to a steady reduction in the cost of power generation and it is now acknowledged that it will be critical for the 2050 net zero target. A large proportion of cost reduction is derived from using very large turbines. Further efficiency gains are expected from even larger rotors, but efficient design and operation of such colossal wind turbines poses some fundamental engineering challenges. Current design rules for turbine separation and operation (which scale with the rotor diameter) will need to be revisited, which calls for a better understanding of the dynamic interactions between different atmospheric conditions, the moving and deforming rotors, and their wakes. Such investigation needs to be performed through computer simulation, using models that resolve both the turbulent atmospheric conditions at farm scale, and their local dynamic effects at the rotor level. On a recent EPSRC/NERC funded project, we have built such simulation framework (1) and demonstrated its suitability to farm scale simulations on very large computing architectures.Wake steering is the controlled misalignment of the turbines with the incoming flow to modify the impact on their wakes on downstream turbines. It has been shown in small scale farms (2) that this cooperative strategy can have a beneficial overall advantage in power production, but much is still unknown in terms of both wake physics, their dependency with atmospheric conditions (e.g., humidity and temperature) and their interactions with rotors, for the adoption of such promising technology in new wind farm developments. This will be addressed in this project, which will carry out a systematic investigation of the independencies between atmospheric conditions, rotor yawing strategies, and the expected power output and dynamic loading on the blades. This information will inform blade/gearbox fatigue models to assess potential trade-offs between power output gains and reduction of operational life. The project has been defined as a CASE PhD studentship with SSE Renewables as an industrial partner. SSE Renewables will host the student and participate in the definition of the problem and the assessment of the results. The collaboration with SSE Renewables for this project will allow us to investigate various rotor yawing strategies under different atmospheric conditions for large-scale wind farms managed by SSE Renewables.