Study on constraining turbulence to met mast data from the WINSENT complex terrain test site for use as inflow for CFD simulations

Abstract

This work presents a method for generating time-resolved, three-dimensional turbulent inflow conditions for URANS/DDES simulations using the flow solver FLOWer. Turbulent inflow fields are generated using the Mann Turbulence Model via python’s Hipersim package and are applied as boundary conditions in the solver. The inflow is to reproduce both the absolute values and spectral characteristics of single-point time series and 3D velocity fields represented in atmospheric turbulence. A dedicated toolchain, InFlow, was developed to process and adapt turbulence input data from the WINSENT test site near Stötten, Germany. The approach is designed to be computationally efficient, straightforward to apply, and accurate enough for use in practical wind energy simulations. Its performance and limitations are evaluated across varying inflow scenarios and setups.