Predicting Wind Turbine Wake Breakdown Using a Free Vortex Wake Code

What is it about?

The mechanism of the breakdown of a helical wind turbine wake, caused by the pairing of tip vortices, is simulated with a medium order free wake code. Traditionally such simulations require higher order CFD simulations. It can be shown that free wake codes can accurately predict such phenomena and show a good resemblance of the flow features predicted by CFD LES simulations while being about 5-6 orders of magnitude more computationally efficient.

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