Reduced Order Modeling for Wind Turbines
Overview
This project investigates the efficiency of projection-based ROMs for simulating large-scale renewable energy systems by coupling the Actuator Line Method (ALM) with the VMS-ROM framework. The study models a single NREL 5 MW wind turbine, followed by a more complex two-turbine back-to-back configuration spaced 7 rotor diameters (7D) apart. To maximize computational speed, a mesh-based hyper-reduction strategy is implemented.
Results
For the single turbine, the hyper-reduced ROM requires only 10 POD modes to accurately predict power production and wake velocity deficits up to 7D downstream.
The mesh-based hyper-reduction strategy achieves a computational speed-up of approximately 13x over the fine-mesh FOM.
In the back-to-back configuration, a 20-mode ROM effectively captures the near-wake dynamics and wake recovery profiles for both the upstream and downstream turbines.
Limitations & Future Work: In multi-turbine setups, the global POD basis struggles to fully resolve the far-wake dynamics of the downstream turbine, where low-frequency wake meandering and complex multi-scale interactions dominate. Future research will scale this framework for full wind farm simulations utilizing multi-domain coupling and efficient hyper-reduction techniques like GNAT and ECSW.