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Mixing by offshore wind infrastructure: Resolving the density stratified wakes past vertical cylinders

Charlie J. Lloyd and Robert M. Dorrell

  • School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, United Kingdom

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 11, 084802 – Published 17 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/9zmy-kb84

Abstract

The offshore wind industry is rapidly expanding to meet clean and secure energy needs. New developments are now increasingly constrained to deeper waters, where the water column is seasonally stratified. Here flows past offshore wind infrastructure will increase water column mixing, although such processes and their extent are poorly understood. Studies have so far been limited to field-scale simulations, which make sweeping assumptions regarding flow-structure interactions and fine-scale stratified turbulence, and field observations, which are limited by the sparsity of measurement campaigns and data captured. To isolate and quantify the key processes governing water column mixing by infrastructure, we present fully structure-resolved direct numerical simulations of two-layer stratified flow past a vertical cylinder. We identify two wake regimes by systematically varying the flow Reynolds and Richardson numbers: (1) a weakly stratified regime, characterized by a narrow but highly energetic wake dominated by horizontal shear and (2) a strongly stratified wake, characterized by the emergence of a thermocline-spanning recirculation cell attached to the cylinder. Here strong vertical motions develop from the recirculation cell which are responsible for the formation of large-scale stationary internal waves. These waves account for up to 10% of the total energy budget and provide a mechanism for far-field energy propagation. The weakly stratified wake regime is characteristic of existing offshore wind sites where temperature gradients are relatively weak; the identified strongly stratified regime describes the dynamics to be expected in future deep water offshore wind sites. This difference between the two regimes offers an explanation for the previously enigmatic discrepancies in field observations regarding wake persistence and detectability. Future work must focus on narrowing the gap between idealized simulations and field-scale flows, for which the datasets herein will provide a critical benchmark for validation.

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 11, 084802– Published 17 August, 2026
  • Received 10 February 2026
  • Accepted 10 July 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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