First comparison of LES of an offshore wind turbine wake with dual-Doppler lidar measurement in the offshore wind farm “alpha ventus”

Abstract:

The planning of offshore wind farms is still tainted with high risks due to unknown power losses and a higher level of fatigue loads due to wake effects. Recently, Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are more and more used for simulating offshore wind turbine wakes as they resolve the atmospheric turbulence as well as the wake turbulence.

However, for an application of LES wind fields to assess offshore wind farm flow a proper validation with measured data is necessary.

Several methods have been investigated at the University of Oldenburg to compare LES wind fields and lidar measurements. In this study we apply one of these methods to validate wake simulations of a single wake of a 5MW wind turbine in the German offshore wind farm "alpha ventus" with processed dual-Doppler lidar measurements in the same wind farm.

The simulations are performed with the LES model PALM, which has been enhanced by two different approaches of actuator models to simulate the wake of single wind turbines and the interaction of wakes in wind farms. Effects of tower and nacelle are regarded as well as simple turbine control mechanisms. The simulations are initialized with comparable atmospheric conditions as during the time of lidar operation by using measurements from the adjacent meteorological mast FINO 1.

Plan Position Indicator (PPI) measurements have been performed with two long-range wind lidars installed at different opposing platforms at the border of the wind farm. A Cartesian grid was overlapped to the scanned region and a dual-Doppler algorithm was applied in order to estimate the horizontal stationary wind field on the grid nodes.

To our knowledge, the presented study is one of the first validations of LES wake simulations with lidar measurements and first which validates offshore LES wake simulations with 2D lidar data.