Paul Veers (editor) - Wind Energy Modeling and Simulation: Atmosphere and plant (Energy Engineering)

The potential for wind power to play a strategic role in meeting future energy demands requires a holistic vision for technology evolution considering all facets of development, deployment, and operation. The atmospheric energy resource and the advanced technology options that maximize energy extraction, mitigate operational loads for increased longevity, and reduce operation and maintenance (O&M) costs must be assessed, verified, and validated as a coupled plant system. This requires advanced HFM that numerically incorporates all of the relevant physical processes, including fluidstructure interaction (FSI), that drive momentum extraction from the wind resource.

Our ability to quantify the flow and turbine physics of interest, develop and implement new turbine technologies and plant-level control strategies, and accurately predict plant performance is a multi-scale and multi-physics computational challenge requiring HFM and HPC. Capturing the relevant flow physics includes coupling atmospheric physical phenomena ranging in scale from regional weather systems down to the turbine-blade boundary layers with all their turbulent temporal and spatial variability. There is significant uncertainty in resolving the flow physics at each scale and, to an even greater extent, transitioning the physical-flow dynamics and turbulence characteristics between scales. Ranging from the mesoscale (105 m) down to the blade-boundary-layer scale (105 m), each domain is dominated by a different set of dynamics and turbulence processes that must be modelled appropriately to predict both power generation and turbine loads.

Capturing the appropriate temporal scales is equally challenging. The relevant scales impacting performance range from wind-resource production at the mesoscale (minutes to hours) to the extraction of energy through turbine boundary-layer dynamics (milliseconds). Throughout the wind plant computational domain, complex turbulence is introduced through a variety of physical processes (e.g. atmospheric mixing, dissipation, convection, diffusion, complex terrain, and turbine wake development), each with unique temporal and spatial characteristics. All elements of the energy production and extraction process must be modelled as integrated and coupled continua to achieve accurate and predictive simulation results.

Fully coupled HFM simulations using petascale (today) and exascale (future) computing capabilities are needed to model the physical phenomena driving energy production in lieu of empiricism to achieve a predictive capability. When detailed atmospheric processes are appropriately captured, including the relevant turbulence sources, dramatic improvements in our understanding of the science phenomenology driving flow within and across scales will lay the foundation for disruptive innovation in wind turbine and plant design and control.