Transient LES of an offshore wind turbine

Abstract. The estimation of the cost of energy of offshore wind farms has a high uncertainty, which is partly due to the lacking accuracy of information on wind conditions and wake losses inside of the farm. Wake models that aim to reduce the uncertainty by modeling the wake interaction of turbines for various wind conditions need to be validated with measurement data before they can be considered as a reliable estimator. In this paper a methodology that enables a direct comparison of modeled with measured flow data is evaluated. To create the simulation data, a model chain including a mesoscale model, a large-eddy-simulation (LES) model and a wind turbine model is used. Different setups are compared to assess the capability of the method to reproduce the wind conditions at the hub height of current offshore wind turbines. The 2-day-long simulation of the ambient wind conditions and the wake simulation generally show good agreements with data from a met mast and lidar measurements, respectively. Wind fluctuations due to boundary layer turbulence and synoptic-scale motions are resolved with a lower representation of mesoscale fluctuations. Advanced metrics to describe the wake shape and development are derived from simulations and measurements but a quantitative comparison proves to be difficult due to the scarcity and the low sampling rate of the available measurement data. Due to the implementation of changing synoptic wind conditions in the LES, the methodology could also be beneficial for case studies of wind farm performance or wind farm control.