Investigating the aerodynamic interaction of wind turbines based on actuator disk model

In this paper, the axisymmetric actuator disk method (2D) with acceptable accuracy and low computational cost based on computational fluid dynamics have been adopted to study the flow behavior around the horizontal wind turbine rotor and the wake. For this sake, a C code is developed as a self-developed user-defined function (UDF) in commercial software package ANSYS FLUENT. The rotor is modeled as a virtual disc and its effect is added to the Navier-Stokes equations as a sink term. The results obtained for the 5 MW NREL wind turbine in this study show the appropriate accuracy and speed-up. The interaction of two wind turbines in the wind farm has been investigated. The results depict that the output power and thrust of the downstream rotor due to the presence of an upstream turbine drop up to 88% and 57%, respectively. Also, radial distribution of the downstream rotor power shows that at a closer distance, the middle part of the blade has a larger contribution to power generation. Further, the effect of downstream rotor on the upstream rotor performance is up to 1.5% and 0.7% reduction in power and thrust respectively.