Assessment of scale interactions associated with wake meandering using bispectral analysis methodologies

Large atmospheric boundary layer fluctuations and smaller turbine-scale vorticity dynamics are separately hypothesized to initiate the wind turbine wake meandering phenomenon, a coherent, dynamic, turbine-scale oscillation of the far wake. Triadic interactions, the mechanism of energy transfers between scales, manifest as triples of wavenumbers or frequencies and can be characterized through bispectral analyses. The bispectrum, which correlates the two frequencies to their sum, is calculated by two recently developed multi-dimensional modal decomposition methods: scale-specific energy transfer method and bispectral mode decomposition. Large-eddy simulation of a utility-scale wind turbine in an atmospheric boundary layer with a broad range of large length-scales is used to acquire instantaneous velocity snapshots. The bispectrum from both methods identifies prominent upwind and wake meandering interactions that create a broad range of energy scales including the wake meandering scale. The coherent kinetic energy associated with the interactions shows strong correlation between upwind scales and wake meandering.