Abstract. Within the energy transition, more and more wind turbines are clustered in big wind farms, often offshore. Therefore, an optimal positioning of the wind turbines is crucial to optimize both the annual power production and the maintenance time. Good knowledge of the wind turbine wake and the turbulence within is thus important. However, although wind turbine wakes have been subject to various studies, they are still not fully understood. One possibility to improve the comprehension is to look into the modeling of bluff body wakes. These wakes have been the subject of intensive study for decades, and by means of the scaling behavior of the centerline mean velocity deficit, the nature of the turbulence inside a wake can be classified. In this paper, we introduce the models for equilibrium and non-equilibrium turbulence from classical wake theory as introduced by A. Townsend and W. George, and we test whether the requirements are fulfilled in the wake of a wind turbine. Finally, we apply the theory to characterize the wind turbine wake, and we compare the results to the Jensen and the Bastankhah-Porté-Agel model. We find that the insight into the classical bluff body wake can be used to further improve the wind turbine wake models. Particularly, the classical bluff body wake models perform better than the wind turbine wake models due to the presence of a virtual origin in the scalings, and we demonstrate the possibility of improving the wind turbine wake models by implementing this parameter. We also see how the dissipation changes across the wake which is important to model wakes within wind farms correctly.
Investigation of the dissipation in the wake of a wind turbine array
