Comparison of the far wake behind dual rotor and dual disk configurations

There is an increasing interest in studying the development of far wakes behind two or more interacting wind turbines in order to determine the influence of wake interaction in relation to the design of wind farms. The focus of this experimental study is to understand and describe the resulting wake features for two rotors subjected to different operating and spatial conditions. As a part of this, a comparison with the wake development behind two disks replacing the rotor models was performed to determine the difference between the two wake systems. LDA and Stereo PIV experiments were carried out to study the development of far wakes behind configurations of dual HAWT wind turbine rotors and dual circular disks. The setups were placed in the middle of a water flume. The initial flow in the flume is subjected to a very low turbulence level, limiting the influence of all external disturbances in order to focus the study to the inherent wake instability. As a result of the investigation, we obtained decays of profiles for the velocity deficit and turbulent pulsations in the far wakes behind both dual rotor and dual disk configurations. By using regression techniques to fit the obtained velocity profiles the experimental data were approximated by identical analytical models and compared to each other. An identical rational dependence with the same powers, but with different coefficients, was found for the two configurations.