LES verification of HAWC2Farm aeroelastic wind farm simulations with wake steering and load analysis

Wind farm simulation tools are used for a multitude of purposes, including energy yield calculations, wind farm control optimization, layout optimization, structural load analysis, and many more. However, the vast majority of farm software either fails to capture the dynamic nature of both the flow and the turbine structural response or demands a high computational cost such as large-eddy simulations (LES). In this study, we present a new mid-fidelity aeroelastic wind farm simulation software, HAWC2Farm, which can perform dynamic wind farm computations at the same temporal and spatial resolution as LES using a fraction of the computational resources. Wind farm simulations are performed with wake steering, and statistics are verified with results from LES performed using Ellipsys3D.