Investigating the Effect of Surface Roughness on Efficiency of Large Wind Farms by Large Eddy Simulation

With the recognition of wind energy in the world, wind farms are expected to become more extended and cover increasingly larger surface areas. The most important issue in large wind farms is increasing power and efficiency. When wind turbines are deployed in large arrays, their efficiency decreases due to complex interactions among themselves and with the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). When the length of the wind farms exceeds the height of the ABL by over an order of magnitude, a “fully developed” flow regime can be established. Since the length of the farm is larger than the atmospheric boundary layer thickness, changes in the streamwise direction can be neglected and the relevant exchanges occur in the vertical direction. In the wind farms established in the fully developed atmospheric boundary layer, the kinetic energy extracted by the wind turbines is transported into the wind-turbine region by vertical fluxes associated with turbulence. Surface roughness is one of the most important factors affecting this phenomenon. In this research, the effect of surface roughness on the efficiency of the large wind farm in the ABL by large eddy simulation is investigated. For this purpose, the large eddy simulation (LES) is applied to solve the turbulence flow equations. In this article wind turbines are modeled using the classical drag disk. The various surface roughnesses are modeled by logarithmic wall functions applied to the bottom of the domain. The results show that the efficiency and power of the wind farm are decreased by increase of surface roughness.