CFD Prediction of the Airflow at a Large-Scale Wind Farm above a Steep, Three-Dimensional Escarpment

The Duogu Wind Farm, China Huadian Group Corporation’s first wind project in Yunnan, China, has been approved by the Provincial Development and Reform Commission. The acquired site is in Mengzi, in the south-east of Yunnan Province. The developer has deployed thirty-three 1.5 MW turbines in this wind farm (49.5 MW), and the total cost of construction has been estimated to be CNY449.7 million ($69.61 million). The present study compared the prediction accuracy of two CFD software packages for simulating flow over an escarpment with a steep slope. The two software packages were: 1) Open FOAM (Turbulence model: SST k-ω RANS), which is a free, open source CFD software package developed by Open CFD Ltd at the ESI Group and distributed by the Open FOAM Foundation and 2) RIAM-COMPACT (Turbulence model: Standard Smagorinsky LES), which has been developed by the lead author of the present paper. Generally good agreement was obtained between the results from the simulations with Open FOAM and RIAM-COMPACT.