Airflow evaluation of wind farm site over complex terrain using LES turbulence model

Recently, the new wind farm has been successfully built in Nagashima island, Kagoshima prefecture. This site is located in complex terrain and, the flow above the ground is also thought to be complex. We analyzed the flow here using the RIAM-COMPACT (Uchida 2014) natural terrain version software, which is based on an LES turbulence model. The accuracy of this software was proved in previous studies. In addition to the CFD analysis, we also conducted airflow measurements using hot wire technique in the boundary layer wind tunnel of the Research Institute for Applied Mechanics, Kyushu University. In this experiment, the vertical wind velocity profile were obtained at 3 locations as time step data, from which we calculated turbulence. The value of scalar wind speed and turbulence by CFD and experiment generally has same tendency at each height of each location. These agreements demonstrates the validity of this CFD software based on LES turbulence modeling.