A simulation model for single and multi-rotor wind turbine performance

Copyright 2015 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE). The continued advancements in wind energy research has led to interest in the development of computationally efficient software that allows for the inclusion of a more complex understanding of the physical processes in the numerical simulations. In this paper a non-dimensional field approach is presented and used to investigate the performance of single rotor and multi-rotor wind turbine configurations. The implementation presented involves a two-step process that first creates large datasets of dimensionless coefficients, and then applies those coefficients to variety of turbine configurations. The datasets are developed using the blade element momentum (BEM) method, and the utilization of dimensionless variables has the advantage of minimizing additional detailed computations. The examples presented illustrate the distribution of forces across single and multiple rotor planes. Further, the examples address the simulation of multi-rotor systems modeling a single row of a wind farm consisting of identical or different wind turbine configurations.

A simulation model for single and multi-rotor wind turbine performance Conference Paper