Abstarct
Most wind farm wake CFD models are based on the actuator disc (AD) or the actuator line (AL) models to estimate the influence of the wind turbine on the atmospheric flows, while full rotor (FR) computations [15, 18] are usually used to estimate accurately the loads and power production of wind turbines.
The assumption made in many models is that after a few rotor diameters the details of the wind turbine rotor geometry become irrelevant to the flow behavior. However, it is important to know how much physics is lost in the near wake when using “simpler” models
like an
actuator line and
actuator disc in comparison with a full rotor computation. To address this question, a systematic comparison of the three different types of wind turbine models was made.
This paper presents the preliminary results from the comparison where the three methods is used to simulate the NREL 5MW turbine in uniform inflow and their predictions of the near wake region is compared to each other.