Actuator disk modeling for a wind farm in complex mountainous terrain: A case study

For optimizing the operational efficiency of a wind farm in complex terrain, the wake study of wind turbines and the detailed analysis of the wind data are essential. In this research, The Manjil wind farm located in the Alborz Mountains with special topography and distinct wind regimes has been studied. OpenFOAM has been applied for computational fluid dynamics simulations of two wind speeds at different reference heights as case studies. Then, a comparison between the simulation results and the available supervisory control and data acquisition dataset was made. The result assumed that the velocity of the wake is recovered up to 85% after ten times the diameter of the turbine. In this distance, there is a 14.5% and 15.5% speed reduction on average for two simulations, with velocity on the hub height of 9 and 17 m/s respectively. The analysis of raw wind data shows that a high potential of wind energy is available in summer and there is almost no wind in wintertime, which causes some challenges for developing the wind farms under these conditions.