Speaker: Jason Jonkman, Senior Engineer, NREL
FAST.Farm is a new mid-fidelity, multi-physics engineering tool for modeling the power performance and structural loads of wind turbines within a wind farm, including wake and array effects. FAST.Farm is based on the principles of the Dynamic Wake Meandering (DWM) model, but addresses many of the limitations of previous DWM implementations. Previous calibration of the tunable model parameters of FAST.Farm has shown that its prediction of wake dynamics for a single wind turbine across different atmospheric stability conditions and nacelle-yaw errors matches well with high-fidelity large-eddy simulation, at a small fraction of the computational expense.
This talk presents a validation of FAST.Farm against large-eddy simulation for a series of cases—independent from those used to support the calibration—considering single turbine and small wind farm scenarios, both subject to variations in inflow and control.
The validation has demonstrated that FAST.Farm accurately predicts (1) thrust and power for individual turbines both in isolation and down the row of the small wind farm, (2) wake meandering behavior across different atmospheric conditions and (3) averaged wake-deficit advection, evolution and merging effects. The validation also highlights potential physics that could be improved in FAST.Farm in the future.