High-fidelity numerical simulations of wind turbines are often performed through a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model in which the wind turbine is parametrized using an actuator line model, as fully blade-resolved simulations are computationally expensive at the large Reynolds numbers involved. When applying such an actuator line approach to the modeling of wind turbines, the two main issues to consider are the free-stream velocity sampling and the choice of the regularization kernel used to project the computed body forces onto the domain. In this work, a novel velocity sampling method - the so-called effective velocity model (EVM) - is implemented in the CFD software SOWFA and assessed against pre-existing approaches. Results show superior method robustness with respect to the regularization kernel width choice while preserving acceptable accuracy.