ARCHER2 Calendar March 2023

Flow within and around a large wind farm

Dr Nikolaos Bempedelis, Imperial College London, Department of Aeronautics

* * * Winning Early Career entry, ARCHER2 Image and Video Competition 2022 * * *

Modern large-scale wind farms consist of multiple turbines clustered together in wind-rich sites. Turbine clustering suffers some drawbacks, as downstream turbines operate within the wake of upstream ones, resulting in the reduction of their power output due to wind speed deceleration and the increase of fatigue loads due to increased wind fluctuations. High-fidelity turbulence-resolving simulations allow us to study the dynamics of the interacting turbine wakes, providing insight into complex flow phenomena such as wake meandering, tip and hub vortex breakdown, and the interaction of the wind farm with the atmospheric boundary layer. The data was generated with the open-source flow solver Xcompact3D on ARCHER2.

This image was published on the March page of the ARCHER2 2023 printed calendar.