Fast-Running Engineering Models of Wind Farm Flows

Dear Colleagues,

Despite the rapid growth of flow measurement technologies and numerical simulation techniques over the last few decades, fast-running engineering models are still the most popular tools in industry to characterise and predict wind farm flows. This is mainly due to their low computational costs and ease of use. These models, which can be empirical or physics-based, cover a wide range of topics including but not limited to:

• Turbine wake flows: mean flow (steady or dynamic) and turbulence characteristics, wake meandering, wake recovery, near-wake to far-wake transition, wake deflection, etc.;
• Cumulative wake effects: wake superposition techniques;
• Load estimation: steady and unsteady distribution of loads on wind turbine blades and other turbine components, blade element momentum theory (BEM), fatigue due to turbulence, and wake immersion, etc.;
• Flow blockage: velocity reduction upwind of wind turbines and wind farms, and flow speed-up (i.e., jetting) between adjacent wind turbine columns in a wind farm;
• Topography and wind farms: impact of hills, forests, and human-made objects on the performance of wind turbines and wind farms;
• Wind farm power production: effect of atmospheric turbulence or layout configuration on power generation, and power unsteadiness caused by turbulence, etc.;
• Wind farm control: influencing wake effects and blockage by adjusting the control of individual turbines;
• Wind farm interaction with the atmospheric boundary layer: top-down models, growth of the internal boundary layer, concept of infinite (i.e., very large) wind farms, wind-farm-induced atmospheric gravity waves, wind farm wakes and farm–farm interactions, etc.;
• Thermal stability and Coriolis force: effect of thermal stratification on performance of wind farms, low-level jets, wind veer, and wind shear, etc.

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather new original research either on the development of new fast-running engineering models or the application of existing models in different fields of wind energy research mentioned above, and beyond.

Dr. Majid Bastankhah
Dr. Ervin Bossanyi
Dr. Dries Allaerts
Guest Editors

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