Impact of forest types on wind power

Abstract

Wind energy is one of the oldest, cleanest and most reliable source of renewable energy. And it has become a subject of interest for many researchers to study on how to maximize its potential. In this study, the interest is to investigate if there is any variation in the wind power production by different types of forests. This study entails the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling including forest and turbine model. The standard actuator disk model was used in this study. All simulations are implemented with the OpenFOAM using the realizable k− SIMPLE-RANS solver. Nine forest cases and a case without forest were considered. The reference turbine is a ”5-MW baseline offshore wind turbine”. It is observed that there is no significant difference in the mean flow of different forest cases. However, the turbulent kinetic energy varies significantly in the different forests.