Close the turbulence–thrust feedback loop with dynamically responsive rotor models

Develop dynamically responsive rotor models that close the feedback loop between farm-induced turbulence, effective farm thrust, and the upstream pressure gradient in wind-farm global blockage.

Background

The experiment uses porous discs as an open-loop representation of a wind farm. This abstraction reproduces the mean pressure field and upstream momentum deficit but suppresses the dynamic thrust response of real rotors, so the measured turbulence amplification cannot feed back into the farm thrust or modify the upstream adverse pressure gradient.

A unresolved extension is therefore to represent dynamically responsive rotors whose effective thrust responds to the amplified large-scale turbulence, thereby closing the coupled turbulence–thrust–blockage system and assessing its consequences for induction-region flow and turbine loading.

References

The porous disc abstraction is necessarily open-loop, suppressing the feedback by which amplified turbulence would modify effective farm thrust and hence the upstream pressure gradient; closing this loop with dynamically responsive rotor models remains for future work.

— Wind farm global blockage as an adverse pressure gradient problem: turbulence amplification and spectral modification in the induction region of a model wind farm  (2609.26415 - McGlade et al., 22 Sep 2026) in Section Conclusions