Terrain Effects on Wind Flow: Simulations With an Immersed Boundary Method

The modelling of the wind resource over arbitrary topography is required to optimize the micrositing of wind turbines. Most solvers use classical body-fitted grid for simulations. In such an approach, to cover the wind rose using a rectangular domain, a dedicated mesh must be generated for each direction. Moreover, over complex terrain, additional numerical errors are introduced in the solver due to coordinate transformations. To overcome these challenges and to facilitate the grid generation process, an immersed boundary method is developed in connection with a RANS solver in order to simulate turbulent atmospheric flows over arbitrary topography. In this method, a Cartesian grid is used and the boundary condition on the terrain surface is modelled within the solver using a “direct forcing” approach. With the immersed boundary method a rectangular grid can be used to simulate the flow field for all wind directions and only a rotation of the digital elevation map is required. Ghost cells are used to enforce the desired boundary condition at the immersed surface. The immersed boundary method developed in this work is used to simulate the flow in connection with both Baldwin-Lomax and kω turbulence models. The performance of the method is examined for the flow over a two-dimensional hill. Results are compared with experimental data as well as a classical body-fitted grid to isolate the effect of the boundary conditions. The comparisons show good agreement among all the results. The results for the three-dimensional wind flow simulation over the Askervein Hill test case are also presented, and show the capability of the immersed boundary method in a full-scale scenario.