Development of an AD/RANS model for predicting wind turbine wakes

The wake flow behind a single wind turbine is studied in this paper using the standard k-ω SST turbulence model with three different modifications: (1) adding sustain terms to maintain ambient turbulence level; (2) modi-fying the coefficients of the turbulence model; (3) combining the first two methods together. The simulations are performed by using the in-house flow solver EllipSys3D coupled with the actuator disc (AD) methodology. The main objective of the proposed model is to control the turbulence decay caused by the intrinsic property of the two-equation turbu-lence model and further increasing the pre-dicted turbulence intensity through correct-ing the destruction terms. To validate the proposed method, comparisons are carried out between measurements and other nu-merical simulations for the Nibe B wind tur-bine. Results show that the newly developed model can provide satisfactory predictions for the wind speed deficit and the turbulence intensity.