Implementation of a Simple Actuator Disc for Large Eddy Simulation (SADLES-V1.0) in the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (V4.3.1) for Wind Turbine Wake Simulation

Abstract. The development of wind energy in recent years has made the representation of wind turbines in numerical models essential for wind resource and environmental assessment. In this study, we introduce a new wind turbine model, the Simple Actuator Disk for Large Eddy Simulation (SADLES), parameterized in the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. Our goal is to perform realistic downscaling of large eddy simulation, so we integrated SADLES and the cell perturbation method as WRF modules and released the code as open-source for further research. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SADLES by comparing a large eddy simulation of a 5-MW wind turbine using the WRF-SADLES with the Parallelized Large-eddy simulation Model (PALM), showing that SADLES can simulate wind turbine wakes effectively at an intermediate resolution of a few dozen meters. Furthermore, we show the applicability of SADLES in wind farm assessment by downscaling the ERA5 reanalysis data to study turbine-to-turbine and farm-to-farm interactions for the Alpha Ventus wind farm. In our case study, due to the wind farm to the southwest, the ambient wind speed at Alpha Ventus is reduced by 14 % and the average turbine power is reduced by 35 %. SADLES provides a promising balance between computational efficiency and accuracy for wind turbine wake simulations and has potential applications in wind energy assessment and wind farm construction planning.