Abstract
A study was made on the influence of the wake mesh resolution on the integrated forces acting on a wind turbine rotor using an unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes flow solver. Solutions were obtained for five wake resolutions ranging from 0.5 rotor diameters to 7.5 diameters downstream resolving up to 13 tip vortex revolutions. It was found that the resolution of the tip vortices in the far-wake beyond half a diameter downstream did not influence the induced velocities in the rotor plane significantly, with the low speed shaft torque differing less than approximately 1% for the rotor in question.
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