The effective velocity model: An improved approach to velocity sampling in actuator line models

Actuator line modeling of wind turbines requires the definition of a free‐stream velocity in a computational mesh and a regularization kernel to project the computed body forces onto the domain. Both choices strongly influence the results. In this work, a novel velocity sampling method—the so‐called effective velocity model (EVM)—is implemented in the CFD software SOWFA, validated, and compared to pre‐existing approaches. Results show superior method robustness with respect to the regularization kernel width ( ϵ) choice while preserving acceptable accuracy. In particular, the power predicted by the EVM is nearly independent of the ϵ value.