Removing/minimizing meandering behavior in FAST.Farm

[dalidog]

Hello OpenFAST Community,

I'm working on a project comparing wake behavior between FAST.Farm and another tool, which does not have built-in wake meandering. I did some research and found that there is no value of the constant Cmeander that fully disables wake meandering out of the box. I was wondering if someone could point me to the equation or section of the Wake Dynamics Module that calculates meandering, so that I can modify the source code? Is this at all possible? (I'm fairly new to FAST.Farm development)

Best regards,
Dalia

[jjonkman]

Dear @dalidog,

There is no way to remove meandering in FAST.Farm, without changing the source code. When present, transverse turbulence will result in wake meandering. Increasing the value of C_Meander will reduce the meandering, but I wouldn't suggest increasing it by a lot as a workaround.

The meandering velocity (V_Plane) is calculated in the Ambient Wind and Array Effects (AWAE) module and passed to the Wake Dynamics (WD) module, where it is used to meander the wake. To remove wake meandering, you'd want to zero-out the velocity components of V_Plane normal to each wake plane.

Best regards,