Four-dimensional wind field generation for the aeroelastic simulation of wind turbines with lidars

Journal paper published in Wind Energy Science

Lidar-assisted control (LAC) of wind turbines is a control concept that takes advantage of a nacelle-mounted lidar (a remote sensing device) to measure upstream wind speeds of a turbine to allow a preview of the incoming turbulence. Because the turbine will not be exposed to the identical turbulence as that measured by the lidar in advance, the simulation of a LAC system will be more realistic if wind evolution can be modelled in the wind field generation. Since the commonly used 3D stochastic wind field generation method does not include wind evolution, the main goal of this research is to extend the 3D method to 4D to enable the modelling of wind evolution along the wind direction. The most novel part of this research is that we propose a "two-step" Cholesky decomposition approach for the factorization of the coherence matrices in the wind field generation. With this approach, 4D wind fields can be generated by combining multiple statistically independent 3D wind fields. To enable better integration of the 4D method into the common workflow of wind turbine simulations, we implement the 4D method as an open-access tool \textit{evoTurb} in combination with TurbSim and Mann turbulence generator. Moreover, since 4D wind field generation is supposed to be coupled with lidar simulations, and considering the range weighting effect of lidars and eventually multiple range gates, a 4D wind field will contain many more simulation points than a 3D one. To avoid excessive computational effort, we further investigate the impacts of the spatial discretization in 4D wind fields on lidar simulations to provide some insights to optimize the application of 4D wind field generation.