COMWIND - Centre for Computational Wind Turbine Aerodynamics and Atmospheric Turbulence

The project concerns the mutual interaction between wind turbine aerodynamics, turbine wakes, terrain affected flow and atmospheric turbulence, which is not accounted for in state of the art modelling. This will be achieved by combining and exploring the knowledge and methodologies of leading national and international research groups within the fields of aerodynamics, computational fluid mechanics, atmospheric physics and wind energy. The project is partitioned into five tasks: 1. Rotor Aerodynamics, 2. Wakes and Clusters, 3. Wind Farms, 4. Siting in Complex Terrain and 5. Atmospheric Boundary Layers. In all of the tasks the focus is on creating methodologies to handle the mutual interaction between the ambient turbulence and the wind turbine. Today, most wind power predictive tools are based on simplified modelling assumptions and ad-hoc empirical corrections. The developed models are in this project based on first principle assumptions (Navier-Stokes equations) with intelligent approximations to deal with the inherent large range of length scales that characterizes the interaction between wind turbines and the atmospheric boundary layer. The outcome of the project is a set of reliable and verified simulation tools, capable of bridging the multi-scale flow phenomena connected with operating wind turbines in the atmospheric boundary layer and enabling designers of wind turbines and wind turbine systems to predict power and aerodynamic loadings of wind turbines and clusters of wind turbines with a much higher accuracy than today