Wind Farm Inflow Wind Simulation based on Mesoscale and Microscale Coupling

Inflow wind simulation is a critical issue that dominates the wind farm design regarding the actual wind environment. Different from traditional real measurement based wind simulation, this paper proposed a mesoscale and microscale coupling strategy, which applies the forecasting information from WRF model to the LES model based SOWFA. Firstly, an offline coupling strategy is implemented with the modular software interface between WRF and SOWFA. The wind speed, potential temperature and pressure data are converted from Geographic Coordinate to Cartesian coordinate that is a readable format to SOWFA. Then, the simulation domain is selected in daytime for neutral ABL condition at a 1kmx1km region where the wind information from WRF is interpolated and averaged at center point with 100m height. Time-series ABL conditions are extracted from center point and force the SOWFA internal solver to simulate the same environment with predictive data. The mesoscale lacked information, turbulence, is generated by periodically running precursor with the surface roughness and boundary conditions. Finally, the comparison between WRF exacted data and SOWFA output verifies the coupling strategy. The result shows that the mesoscale and microscale coupling has high fidelity and accuracy simulation at stable ABL conditions and slow-changing wind environments. This work provides a low cost and reliable data source which allows the inflow wind simulation to have the predictive ability for actual wind.