Computational study and modeling of turbine spacing effects in infinite aligned wind farms

We study the turbine spacing effects in infinite, aligned wind-turbine arrays using large-eddy simulation (LES) with the wind turbine rotors parameterized as actuator disks. A series of simulations is carried out to systematically investigate the different effects of streamwise and spanwise turbine spacings on the array power output and turbulence intensities. We show that for the same turbine density, increasing the streamwise spacing is more beneficial than increasing the spanwise spacing. Larger streamwise turbine spacing increases the power extraction and lowers the turbulence intensity at each turbine more efficiently than when the spanwise turbine spacing is increased. The reason for the different effects of streamwise and spanwise turbine spacings on wind farm performance is that the wake recovery of wind turbines in infinite arrays depends on the area influenced by the wind-turbine wakes, rather than the land area occupied by each turbine. Based on this idea, an improved effective roughness height model is proposed, which can account for the different effects of streamwise and spanwise turbine spacings in infinite aligned wind farms. The predictive capabilities of the new model are demonstrated via extensive comparisons with results obtained from the LES and previously proposed roughness height models. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4767727]