Simulation of the Atmospheric Boundary Layer for Wind Energy Applications

Energy production from wind is an increasingly important component of overall global power generation, and will likely continue to gain an even greater share of electricity production as world governments attempt to mitigate climate change and wind energy production costs decrease. Wind energy generation depends on wind speed, which is greatly influenced by local and synoptic environmental forcings. Synoptic forcing, such as a cold frontal passage, exists on a large spatial scale while local forcing manifests itself on a much smaller scale and could result from topographic effects or land-surface heat fluxes. Synoptic forcing, if strong enough, may suppress the effects of generally weaker local forcing. At the even smaller scale of a wind farm, upstream turbines generate wakes that decrease the wind speed and increase the atmospheric turbulence at the downwind turbines, thereby reducing power production and increasing fatigue loading that may damage turbine components, respectively. Simulation of atmospheric processes that span a considerable range of spatial and temporal scales is essential to improve wind energy forecasting, wind turbine siting, turbine maintenance scheduling, and wind turbine design.;Mesoscale atmospheric models predict atmospheric conditions using observed data, for a wide range of meteorological applications across scales from thousands of kilometers to hundreds of meters. Mesoscale models include parameterizations for the major atmospheric physical processes that modulate wind speed and turbulence dynamics, such as cloud evolution and surface-atmosphere interactions. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used in this dissertation to investigate the effects of model parameters on wind energy forecasting. WRF is used for case study simulations at two West Coast North American wind farms, one with simple and one with complex terrain, during both synoptically and locally-driven weather events. The model's performance with different grid nesting configurations, turbulence closures, and grid resolutions is evaluated by comparison to observation data. Improvement to simulation results from the use of more computationally expensive high resolution simulations is only found for the complex terrain simulation during the locally-driven event. Physical parameters, such as soil moisture, have a large effect on locally-forced events, and prognostic turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) schemes are found to perform better than non-local eddy viscosity turbulence closure schemes.;Mesoscale models, however, do not resolve turbulence directly, which is important at finer grid resolutions capable of resolving wind turbine components and their interactions with atmospheric turbulence. Large-eddy simulation (LES) is a numerical approach that resolves the largest scales of turbulence directly by separating large-scale, energetically important eddies from smaller scales with the application of a spatial filter. LES allows higher fidelity representation of the wind speed and turbulence intensity at the scale of a wind turbine which parameterizations have difficulty representing. Use of high-resolution LES enables the implementation of more sophisticated wind turbine parameterizations to create a robust model for wind energy applications using grid spacing small enough to resolve individual elements of a turbine such as its rotor blades or rotation area.;Generalized actuator disk (GAD) and line (GAL) parameterizations are integrated into WRF to complement its real-world weather modeling capabilities and better represent wind turbine airflow interactions, including wake effects. The GAD parameterization represents the wind turbine as a two-dimensional disk resulting from the rotation of the turbine blades. Forces on the atmosphere are computed along each blade and distributed over rotating, annular rings intersecting the disk. While typical LES resolution (10-20 m) is normally sufficient to resolve the GAD, the GAL parameterization requires significantly higher resolution (1-3 m) as it does not distribute the forces from the blades over annular elements, but applies them along lines representing individual blades.;In this dissertation, the GAL is implemented into WRF and evaluated against the GAD parameterization from two field campaigns that measured the inflow and near-wake regions of a single turbine. The data-sets are chosen to allow validation under the weakly convective and weakly stable conditions characterizing most turbine operations. The parameterizations are evaluated with respect to their ability to represent wake wind speed, variance, and vorticity by comparing fine-resolution GAD and GAL simulations along with coarse-resolution GAD simulations. Coarse-resolution GAD simulations produce aggregated wake characteristics similar to both GAD and GAL simulations (saving on computational cost), while the GAL parameterization enables resolution of near wake physics (such as vorticity shedding and wake expansion) for high fidelity applications. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).