CFD approach to evaluation of wind energy in complex terrain

To evaluate the wind energy distribution in a complex terrain which is impossible to be done by using traditional methods, two strong wind events with stable wind direction were selected from the field record of a real complex terrain and were used as the researching objects. Then, the wind field in the terrain was meshed into hexahedral grids with two resolutions of 40 m×40 m and 20 m×20 m, and two turbulence models, namely SST k-ω and RNG k-ω, were adopted to simulate the wind speed field distribution. The simulation results of the wind indicate that SST k-ω model is superior to RNG k-ω model because it is of higher accuracy of the grid with a horizontal space of 20 m, and that, in the case of SST (20 m), the mean relative errors between the simulated and the measured wind speeds in 157° and 83° directions are respectively 6.46% and 5.50%. The authors also proposed a full-direction wind energy evaluation method applicable to complex terrains, which takes into consideration both the wind speeding ratio distribution obtained from CFD simulation and the local normal meteorological data.