Spatiotemporal Evolution of Wind Turbine Wake Characteristics at Different Inflow Velocities

Abstract

In this paper, the spatiotemporal evolution of wind turbine (WT) wake characteristics is studied based on lattice Boltzmann method-large eddy simulations (LBM-LES) and grid adaptive encryption at different incoming flow velocities. It is clearly captured that secondary flow occurs in the vortex ring under shear force in the incoming flow direction, the S-wave and the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability occur in the major vortex ring mainly due to the unstable vortex ring interface with small disturbance of shear velocity along the direction of flow velocity. The S-wave and Kelvin–Helmholtz instability are increasingly enhanced in the main vortex ring, and three-dimensional disturbances are inevitable along the mainstream direction when it evolves along the flow direction. With increasing incoming flow, the S-wave and Kelvin–Helmholtz instability are gradually enhanced due to the increasing shear force in the flow direction. This is related to the nonlinear growth mechanism of the disturbance. The analysis of the velocity signal, as well as the pressure signal with a fast Fourier transform, indicates that the interaction between the vortices effectively accelerates the turbulence generation. In the near-field region of the wake, the dissipation mainly occurs at the vortex at the blade tip, and the velocity distribution appears asymmetric around the turbine centerline under shear and the mixing of fluids with different velocities in the wake zone also leads to asymmetric distributions.

Keywords

• wakes
• vortex instability
• turbulence simulation
• shear action
• vortex dissipation