A parabolized Navier-Stokes method for wind farm applications

Fluid flow simulations play an important role in the wind industry. With the development of large wind farms, flow simulations through an entire wind farm are becoming a necessity. These are required for designing the layout of new wind farms in the development stage and for forecasting power production from the existing ones for operational purposes. Conventional Navier-Stokes simulations (commonly referred to as CFD simulations) are computationally very expensive since they require a supercomputer with runtimes of several weeks. A Parabolized Navier-Stokes (PNS) method is developed and implemented in this study. The developed PNS method requires less stringent approximations as compared to the existing parabolic methods and incorporates more physics. A wind turbine model is developed and coupled with the PNS method for simulating wind turbines and entire wind farms. The wind turbine model is adapted for spatial marching and is based on the Actuator Line rotor model and Blade Element Momentum theory. The developed PNS method is validated and verified using several test cases and a wind farm simulation on a desktop computer has a runtime of only several hours