Research Projects

Due to rapid depletion of fossil fuels and increasing demand of wind energy across the globe specially in developing countries due to their growing economy, wind farms are being increasingly installed at varied terrain complexities. Though the appropriate assessment of wind energy resources in those complex terrains is the need of the hour in planning and development stages, it still remains a challenging problem. In this regard, mesoscale meteorological models (MMM) using Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) tools (with atmospheric data) can simulate realistic wind forecasts over several days with a spatial resolution ranging from a continent level to a few hundred-meter scales. However, the finest of mesoscale NWP having a resolution of a few hundreds of meters, cannot capture the wind representation in a local complex terrain, particularly found in wind farm sites. Wind farms have a characteristic length of the order of meters, which would require massive computational resources to use mesoscale simulation tools. Such three-dimensional effects pertaining to local flow fields at the turbine level is unsuitable for such mesoscale modelling. This limitation of MMM for wind resource assessment in a complex terrain demands a strategy to couple these models with microscale modelling approach. In this proposed work, OpenFOAM Software will be used to solve the steady-state RANS equation, and simultaneously mesoscale NWP simulation data would be used as an input boundary condition to the micro modelling in OpenFOAM. In general, the input from the meso-model will be integrated as an average sense into a CFD model with finer grids as a downscaling method. The project propose to make use of the direct coupling method that uses the output from the NWP model to define the initial conditions and the boundary conditions of the CFD model.