ICOPE-15-1102 Wind resource evaluation for optimizing wind turbine placement on complex terrain

As the wind farms are constructed in complex terrain in recent years, the wind resource analysis is becoming more important. The purpose of our study is optimizing wind turbine placement in complex terrain for more AEP. In this paper we performed validation of CFD wind analysis. The validation method is comparison of measured and calculated wind profiles. The wind speed and direction were measured by "WINDCUBE" at the altitude from 40m to 260m by 20m for about one month in Nagashima-Kuronoseto wind farm in Nagashima island, Kagoshima prefecture. "RIAM-COMPACT", which is a CFD software based on an LES turbulence model, was used for wind flow analysis. We compared the 10min averaged data by measurement and all time averaged data by CFD on the wind profiles of speed, direction, and standard deviation of north-west and north-east winds.. It is confirmed that the CFD results reproduce the difference of topographic effects depending on wind direction and that "RIAM-COMPACT" is able to predict the actual wind affected by complex terrain.