The vertical bars represent the instantaneous power production of the wind turbines and the color map shows the axial velocity field; simulation performed by M. Moens (UCL, Université catholique de Louvain).

BigFlow4WIND is a wind farm-scale simulation tool designed to provide accurate power predictions for the wind turbines composing the farm. It provides the unsteady characterization (power, torque, wake) of:

• various wind turbine types,
• in a wind farm, and
• evolving in various atmospheric conditions.

While VPM4WIND is limited in practice to the simulation of a few wind turbines, BigFlow4WIND can account for several tens (hundreds) of turbines in a farm at a low computational cost. Thanks to its high efficiency and scalability, it is well suited to perform simulations of complete wind farms in a high-performance computation framework (HPC).

BigFlow4WIND is based on a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) enabled fourth order Finite Difference method for the discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations in the velocity-pressure formulation. The ground is modeled using a wall stress model for rough walls and wind turbine rotors are accounted for using an Actuator Disk (AD) method, which is in contrast with the lifting line methodology adopted for the VPM4WIND tool. The present AD model is able to account for non-uniform torque and thrust effects over the rotor.