A preliminary numerical study of the wake effects on the fatigue load for wind farm based on elastic actuator line model

Abstract

Abstract Wake effect commonly exists in the current large wind farms, which will cause not only 10–20% decline of whole power production but also 5–15% increase of fatigue loading on the wind turbine rotor. As a result, it is an important topic to quantify wake-induced fatigue damage in wind farm. In the current research, coupled with precursor method, elastic actuator line model was employed to simulate the fatigue damage loading on the wind turbine blades in wind farm. An obvious peak shift can be found between the power spectrum of upstream and downstream wind turbines, which is induced by the wake turbulence. From the simulation results, it was found that the high amplitude loading cycles of downstream wind turbine is much higher than that of upstream one, which will definitely cause the fatigue damage on the blades. This research work is a preliminary research for the wake-induced fatigue damage by elastic actuator line model. More quantitative study about the wake-induced fatigue damage will be carried out in the future work.