Inflow generation for large eddy simulation (LES) of the wind farms

Supervisors: Professor Lin Ma, Professor Mohamed Pourkashanian and Professor Derek B Ingham.

Wind farms are large regions usually outside cities and include a number of wind turbines. An accurate simulation of the flow in the wind farm is essential in the design of the wind farm. This project concerns the turbulent inflow generation for large eddy simulation of the wind flow at wind farms.

Inflow generation techniques are among the top notch research topics in the wind engineering field. This instantaneous value of the velocity components consists of their mean and fluctuating values. This information is not known a priori, so it has to be evaluated in an accurate way.

Currently, there are two main techniques for this purpose, the recycling (precursor) methods and synthetic methods. The first method is computationally very time consuming while the second method is not accurate for turbulent wind simulations. Therefore, this project will concern an alternative solution for inflow generation which can replace either of these techniques.

This project, requires a good understanding of CFD and during the work includes simulations using ANSYS/FLUENT.

For further information contact Professor Derek B Ingham (d.ingham@sheffield.ac.uk).