RANS-AD based ANN surrogate model for wind turbine wake deficits

Inside wind farms, wake effects are the primary source of turbine interactions, and as such, they constitute one of the most important aspects of wind farm operations. The two most widespread methods for calculating the wind farm wake flow are computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods and engineering models. Both methods have drawbacks; CFD methods can be very accurate but are computationally expensive. Vice versa, engineering models sacrifice accuracy by simplifying the physics, thereby improving computational efficiency. In cases where many evaluations of the flow are needed, this trade-off is a hindrance. One such case is wind farm layout optimization problems. It has been shown that the estimation of wake flows can be improved by surrogate modeling. Recently, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been demonstrated to predict accurate wakes over a mesh. In this work, a new mesh-free ANN-based wake model is proposed. This new model can predict the flow everywhere in the domain, and as it employs smooth activation functions, it is suitable for gradient-based optimization. Two ANNs were trained with data generated by Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes with Actuator Disc simulations for several yaw angles. The first ANN predicts streamwise wake velocity induction/deficit, the second ANN predicts added wake turbulence intensity. Both ANNs predict with a low error.