Wind-Wave Interaction Effects on a Wind Farm Power Production

In the current study, the effects of the nonlocally generated long sea surface waves (swells) on the power production of a 2 x 2 wind farm are investigated by using large-eddy simulations (LES) and actuator-line method (ALM). The short sea waves are modeled as a roughness height, while the wave-induced stress accounting for swell effects is added as an external source term to the momentum equations. The results show that the marine atmospheric boundary layers (MABLs) obtained in this study have similar characteristics as the MABLs observed during the swell conditions by many other studies. The current results indicate also that swells have significant impacts on the MABL. As a consequence of these changes in the MABL, swells moving faster than the wind and aligned with the local wind direction increase the power extraction rate.