The effective velocity model: An improved approach to velocity sampling in actuator line models

Actuator line modeling of wind turbines requires the definition of a free-streamvelocity in a computational mesh and a regularization kernel to project the com-puted body forces onto the domain. Both choices strongly influence the results. Inthis work, a novel velocity sampling method—the so-called effective velocitymodel (EVM)—is implemented in the CFD software SOWFA, validated, and com-pared to pre-existing approaches. Results show superior method robustness withrespect to the regularization kernel width (ε) choice while preserving acceptableaccuracy. In particular, the power predicted by the EVM is nearly independent of theεvalue.