Smart City projects are on the rise world-wide. These urban centers aim to manage assets efficiently, and with climate change being a major concern, they also want to provide clean and efficient energy. Wind energy is a major player in powering these cities.
We asked Lyna Etienne-Lenormand, Senior Solution Consultant with SIMULIA who developed this workflow, to provide answers to some common questions.
Q. Why does this workflow need to be analyzed?
Smart City projects are springing up all across the globe and together with these projects also comes the huge demand for Clean Energy to power these cities, Wind Energy being one of them. Questions on Smart City planning needs to be answered every day: Where should the wind farm be positioned? What happens if we plan to have new buildings near the wind farm? What is the impact on the environment? These questions require the help of simulation to test different scenarios taking the landscape, wind farm and buildings into consideration.
Q. Describe the workflow.
A. The workflow focuses on wind turbine placement in an urban environment. We start by defining the environment: landscape, buildings, routes, bridges, etc. inside CATIA. Then the wind farm is positioned in the landscape for testing purposes with standard operating conditions (steady front winds and average wind turbine rotation). A new building constraint is then introduced inside the existing environment and the impact of this new construction is evaluated again with simulation.
Q. What are the key simulation goals? What are you trying to learn from the simulation?
A. The right placement of the wind farm can be estimated with the trade-off between power generated and environmental constraints. Testing inter-turbine spacing, understanding the wind turbine wake effects on the environment and buildings, extracting wind forces, etc. are some examples of the simulation goals that can be achieved in this workflow.
Q. Which SIMULIA solutions did you use?
A. The CFD RANS solutions available on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform were used, including the newly developed MRF capability.
Q. What were the advantages of using simulation?
A. Simulation brings the possibility of testing WHAT-IF scenarios easily and rapidly on the wind farm layout in the actual environment, where real testing is impossible.
