Brief communication: Wind speed independent actuator disk control for faster AEP calculations of wind farms using CFD

A simple wind speed independent actuator disk control method is proposed that can be applied to speed up annual energy production calculations of wind farms using Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes simulations. The new control method allows the user to simulate the effect of different wind speeds in one simulation by scaling a calibrated thrust coefficient curve, while keeping the inflow constant. Since the global flow is not changed, only the local flow around the actuator disks needs be recalculated from a previous converged result, which reduces the number of required iterations and computational effort by a factor of about 2-3.