Testing the Coupled Wake Boundary Layer model with LES of turbulent flow in widely spaced wind farms

etc15 Tracking Number 136

The Coupled Wake Boundary Layer (CWBL) model combines a classical wake model with a ``top-down'' boundary layer model through two-way coupling to combine the strengths of these two analytical modeling approaches. The wake model part of the CWBL model captures the effects of the relative turbine positioning and the growth of wakes due to turbulence while the ``top-down'' part describes the interactions between the wind-farm and the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer. Previously, the CWBL model has been shown to provide improved predictions compared to the results obtained from classical wake and ``top-down'' models for the power production of aligned and staggered wind-farm configurations with turbine spacing of up to $8$ turbine diameters. In addition the CWBL model has been validated against detailed LES results and field measurements for the Horns Rev and Nysted wind-farms. Here we will compare the CWBL model predictions for wind-farms with very large inter-turbine spacings with results from new large eddy simulations to verify the validity of the CWBL model in that regime.