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Wind farm modelling

Power losses from wakes in wind farms are difficult to predict, but this effect is usually underestimated, and the impact on the overall power output from the farm is likely to be in the region of 5-10 per cent. Hence, there is an obvious need for improved predictive capabilities on the optimisation and layout of offshore wind farms. Many companies and research institutions develop specialized software and decision support systems (SDSS) for offshore wind energy exploitation, and some systems cover the entire process from project development, wind farm layout, restriction area, geological items, cable routes, grid connection, and operation and maintenance. However, current SDSS models cannot describe the physical phenomena that govern the interaction between the MBL and energy capture in a single wind turbine, not to mention the complex interactions between several wind turbines and the MBL in offshore wind parks.

While currently available CFD tools are too computationally expensive to simulate the interaction between the MBL and an offshore wind farm in detail, the ambition here is to perform such simulations with the new CFD tool CMR-Wind that will be able to handle complex large-scale geometries through the distributed porosity concept. The modelling will describe complex wake effects in offshore wind farms with multiple turbines (20-200), for various park layouts, and under changing wind and wave conditions. This type of prediction is particularly valuable for offshore wind parks, because the performance of currently available analytical models is poor in the wake near the turbines, and because of the extended wake region in the MBL due to less intense turbulence offshore compared to onshore.