Post by EoCoE Centre of Excellence: HPC for energy

LES-Modelling of offshore wind farms using a high order continuous spectral element solver   In the last ERCOFTAC – Recent Advances in Turbulent Wind-Farm Dynamics event (22nd – 24th April 2026, Imperial College London, United Kingdom), Herbert Owen (Senior researcher at Barcelona Supercomputing Center, BSC-CNS) presented a study about LES-Modelling of offshore wind farms using a high order continuous spectral element solver. This study develops a high-fidelity Large Eddy Simulation (LES) framework to model offshore wind farms under the influence of gravity waves, which significantly affect wind flow and power output. It employs a high-order spectral element solver (SOD2D) optimized for GPU computing to handle very large computational domains. Advanced numerical techniques, mesh optimization, and actuator disk modeling are used to ensure accuracy and efficiency. The approach is validated against reference data and applied to a real wind farm, successfully capturing flow dynamics and production patterns.