Assessing the Effect of Coriolis Acceleration on the Coherent Structures in the Wake of a Wind Turbine Using Dynamic Mode Decomposition

Abstract The present work aims to study the effect of veer, namely, the height-dependent lateral deflection of wind velocity due to Coriolis acceleration, on the coherent structures in the wake of the national renewable energy laboratory 5-MW reference wind turbine using the sparsity-promoting dynamic mode decomposition (SP-DMD) method for the detection of dynamically relevant flow structures. Large eddy simulation (LES) of the flow impacting the wind turbine is carried out by solving the filtered Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible flows. The effects of both tower and nacelle are included in the simulation using the immersed boundary method. Simulations are performed at Re≈108, generating the inlet velocity profile by a precursor simulation of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) subjected to Coriolis acceleration. The analysis of the dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) results allows to study the effects of the Coriolis acceleration on the most relevant dynamic modes in the turbine wake and to understand the basic mechanisms by which the wind veer significantly affects the wake recovery rate. Moreover, as a result of the SP-DMD methodology, the most relevant modes are extracted from the wake and a limited subset of relevant flow features that optimally approximates the original data sequence is identified. This small number of modes represent the kernel that can be employed for developing an accurate reduced order model of the wake.