Hazard assessment of wind turbine wakes turbulence: initial results

Wind turbines are designed to efficiently remove energy from the wind and by doing so, create perturbations to the atmosphere in form of wake turbulence. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the wind turbine wake turbulence poses a danger in particular to small and light aircraft. We present an assessment of the hazard of wind turbine wake turbulence to small aircraft based on detailed wake turbulence simulations. We propose a method to efficiently simulate the far wake of wind turbine a hybrid approach using a combination of the Lifting Line Theory (LLT) for the near field and Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) for the far field simulation.