Reduced-Order Models of Wind Farm Blockage and Far-Field Wake Recovery

风能是加拿大增长最快的可再生能源形式，2019年在加拿大的年投资超过10亿美元。尽管如此，要实现国家可再生能源目标，加拿大的风力发电能力将在未来几十年大幅增加。新的项目需要对规划中的风电场的能源生产潜力进行准确预测。这样的预测是使用风电场设计工具，如OpenWind®，这是由UL LLC开发的行业领先软件，用于规划拟议的风能场地的布局和资源估计。为了产生准确的预测，风电场设计软件需要经过充分验证但同时又低成本的模型，以捕捉风电场内的风沙和空气动力学过程。虽然这样的模型已经被用于数百个风能项目，但最近的研究表明，低能尾流在下风方向的恢复和风电场上风向的阻塞效应预测很差。风电场尾迹的远场恢复对于评估邻近风电场对整体发电潜力的影响是非常重要的。堵塞效应，即迎面而来的风因风力发电场的存在而变慢，在历史上被认为是可以忽略不计的。然而，最近的研究表明，忽视阻塞会导致对风力发电场发电潜力的过度预测。与UL合作，将对虚拟风电场进行大量高保真计算流体动力学模拟，从中开发用于风电场阻塞和远场尾迹恢复的改进降阶模型，并通过实际风电场的现场测量进行验证。该项目承诺提高新风电项目的电力预测准确性，并促进加拿大风能丰富的沿海和北部地区的投资，加快加拿大向清洁能源的过渡。

Wind energy is Canada's fastest-growing form of renewable energy, with annual investment in Canada exceeding one billion dollars in 2019. Still, achieving national renewable energy targets will require Canada's wind capacity to be significantly increased in the coming decades. New projects require accurate prediction of the energy production potential of a planned wind farm. Such predictions are made using wind farm design tools such as OpenWind®, an industry-leading software developed by UL LLC for layout planning and resource estimation of proposed wind energy sites. To yield accurate predictions, wind farm design software require well-validated but simultaneously low-cost models that capture the aeolian and aerodynamic processes within the wind farm. While such models have been used for hundreds of wind projects, recent studies have shown that the recovery of the low-energy wake downwind and the blockage effect upwind of the wind farm are poorly predicted. Far-field recovery of the wake behind a wind farm is very important for assessing the impact of neighboring wind farms on the overall generation potential. Blockage effects, where the oncoming wind slows down in response to the presence of the wind farm, were historically assumed to be negligible. Recent studies, however, have shown that ignoring blockage yields over-prediction of the wind farm's generation potential. In collaboration with UL, a large series of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic simulations will be conducted of virtual wind farms, from which improved reduced-order models for wind farm blockage and far-field wake recovery will be developed and validated against field measurements of real wind farms. The project promises to increase the accuracy of power forecasting for new wind projects and promote investment in Canada's wind-rich coastal and northern regions, accelerating Canada's transition to clean energy sources.