An application of the actuator disc model for wind turbine wakes calculations

Numerical simulation of wake losses is a fundamental step towards the optimization of the exploitation of the renewable wind energy potential especially in off-shore conditions or in coastal areas. ientific community is quickly developing new advanced modelling techniques in order to improve the reliability of power losses calculation in many different kinds of environment; analytical models are going to be replaced by new Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes that seem to be more useful, especially for large offshore wind farms. present work an actuator disc model was implemented in order to simulate the wakes of a wind farm; this model was used within the CFD code PHOENICS (the numerical core of the Windsim package) working with an orthogonal Cartesian grid. del was validated using real production data from a small wind farm operating in the western coastal region of Finland; the numerical wind speed profiles were verified using anemometer data from a mast placed near the turbines. sults demonstrate that, despite its simplicity, the actuator disc model can give very useful information when developing a wind farm in off-shore or coastal areas. ork was carried out within a cooperation between the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Perugia and VTT, the technical research centre of Finland.