Vortex identification for the study of atmospheric flow: a new vortex criterion applied to wind resource assessment

Vortex identification is a non-consensual point of discussion among fluid mechanics researchers.
Classical criteria such as Q and delta are hereby confronted with a new definition.
A pertinent task for wind power project development studies is the post-processing analysis of the wind
resource simulations in order to improve the project design. There is a large interest in extracting more
information from typical commercial software – like WindSim, OpenWind, Meteodyn, WAsP – outputs at a
minimal cost.
The proposed methodology of vortex identification in flows contributes with a more sophisticated wind
resource analysis. It is also interesting to note that the additional financial investment and computational effort
to perform this stage’s calculations is negligible when compared to the previous calculation steps.