RaptorC
Many of the areas favourable for wind farm development are at least partially covered with vegetative canopies. This complexity has long been known to be poorly represented in many, if not all, forms of atmospheric modeling.
RaptorC™ is a groundbreaking step in the direction of improving our ability to accurately model in these areas. RaptorC™ increases accuracy of wind flow and wind resource calculations in vegetated terrain with a leading edge computational treatment of drag forces in vegetative canopies.
RaptorC™ is based on RaptorNL™ and is a fully coupled, non-linear flow model. RaptorC™ is the result of a number of years of research in the field of modeling canopy flows and collaborations with CSIRO in Australia and The National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US.
Technical Highlights:
- Non-linear
- Incompressible
- K-Epsilon and Full Reynolds stress turbulence closures implemented
- Terrain following vertically stretched coordinates
Development based on:
- Field observations
- Wind tunnel observations
- Eddy resolving calculations
- Improved theory
- Advances in computational methods
More about RaptorC™
Presentation to American Wind Energy Association, Denver, May 2005.
