Development and Validation of a Highly Scalable Finite-Volume Unstructured LES Solver for Wind Farm Flows

The expansion of wind energy projects, both in number and scale, alongside advancements in high-performance computing, necessitates the use of highly efficient, parallel simulation tools to model the complex flow fields around entire wind farms. Such simulations involve vast numbers of degrees of freedom and can provide crucial insights into farm-scale physical phenomena. In this work, we present a parallel implementation of the Actuator Line Method (ALM) integrated into a massively parallel finite volume solver. This implementation enables high-fidelity Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) of wind turbines and rotor-wake interactions on unstructured grids comprising up to billions of cells, with a focus on optimal workload balancing and minimal turnaround time. The effectiveness and accuracy of the LES/ALM technique in our solver have been validated through various test cases, demonstrating promising performance.