Wind turbines are usually clustered in wind farms which causes the downstream turbines to operate in the turbulent wakes of upstream turbines. As turbulence is directly related to increased fatigue loads, knowledge of the turbulence in the wake and its evolution are important. Therefore, the main objective of this study is a comprehensive exploration of the turbulence evolution in the wind turbine’s wake to identify characteristic turbulence regions. For this, we present an experimental study of three model wind turbine wake scenarios that were scanned with hot-wire anemometry with a very high downstream resolution. The model wind turbine was exposed to three inflows: laminar inflow as a reference case, a central wind turbine wake, and half of the wake of an upstream turbine. A detailed turbulence analysis reveals four downstream turbulence regions by means of the mean velocity, variance, turbulence intensity, energy spectra, integral and Taylor length scales, and the Castaing parameter that indicates the intermittency, or gustiness, of turbulence. In addition, a wake core with features of homogeneous isotropic turbulence and a ring of high intermittency surrounding the wake can be identified. The results are important for turbulence modeling in wakes and optimization of wind farm wake control.

Wind turbines are exposed to the turbulent wind of the atmospheric boundary layer. Consequently, the aerodynamic forces acting on the rotor blades are highly complex. To improve the understanding, a common practice is the experimental or numerical investigation of 2d (wind turbine) blade sections. In these investigations, the flow around the 2d blade section is assumed to be two‐dimensional; however, 3d effects are known to occur. Therefore, we combine 2d CFD simulations and experimental investigations in a wind tunnel with a 2d wind turbine rotor blade section at full‐scale (i.e., chord length and chord‐based Reynolds number of ). In the wind tunnel, the inflow turbulence intensity is . To avoid wall effects biasing the results, the profile does not span the whole test section. The profile was equipped with two rows of pressure taps around the airfoil, close to the center, to monitor the time‐resolved aerodynamic response as well as the flow around the airfoil. The normal force, curves, and the separation point are analyzed. While 2d simulations and experiments match well, in the experiments, we find natural instabilities, that is, local and temporal variations of the flow separation point at angles of attack close to the maximum lift that are not triggered externally, for example, by inflow variations.

The wakes of a uniform and a non-uniform porous disk exposed to two different turbulent flows are investigated experimentally. The disks are representative of static wind turbine models found in literature. Six wake profiles were collected through hot-wire anemometry between three and 30 diameters downstream of the disks. Both one-point and two-point statistics are studied. The results show that higher freestream turbulence affects the wake of the uniform disk more than that of the non-uniform disk, also changing the wake’s shape and recovery rate. Furthermore, we confirm earlier findings that the turbulence at the centerline in the developed part of the wake is independent of both the design of the wake-generating object and the inflow. Similar to findings in the wake of a wind turbine, a ring of high intermittency is found at the very edge of the wakes of both disks and in both inflow conditions. We identify the existence of this ring over a range of scales. The results show that, even for higher-order two-point statistics, the developed wake of different porous disks qualitatively agrees well with the wake of wind turbine models. Graphical abstract

The evolution of the mean velocity and the turbulence downstream of wind turbine wakes within the atmospheric boundary layer has been studied over the past decades, but an analytical description is still missing. One possibility to improve the comprehension of this is to look into the modeling of turbulent bluff body wakes. There, by means of the streamwise scaling of the centerline mean velocity deficit, the nature of the turbulence inside a wake can be classified. In this paper, we introduce the analytical model of classical wake theory as introduced by Albert Alan Townsend and William Kenneth George. To test the theories, data were obtained from wind tunnel experiments using hot-wire anemometry in the wakes of a single model wind turbine and a model wind turbine operating in the wake of an upstream model wind turbine. First, we test whether the requirements under which the Townsend–George theory is valid are fulfilled in the wake of a wind turbine. Based on this verification we apply the Townsend–George theory. Further, this framework allows for distinguishing between two types of turbulence, namely equilibrium and non-equilibrium turbulence. We find that the turbulence at the centerline is equilibrium turbulence and that non-equilibrium turbulence may be present at outer parts of the wake. Finally, we apply the Townsend–George theory to characterize the wind turbine wake, and we compare the results to the Jensen and the Bastankhah–Porté-Agel models. We find that the recent developments from the classical bluff body wake formalism can be used to further improve the wind turbine wake models. Particularly, the classical bluff body wake models perform better than the wind turbine wake models due to the presence of a virtual origin in the scalings, and we demonstrate the possibility of improving the wind turbine wake models by implementing this parameter. We also see how the dissipation changes across the wake, which is important to model wakes within wind farms correctly.