An open-source framework for the development, deployment and testing of wind farm control strategies

Abstract

Recent advances in wind farm control, particularly in wake steering strategies, have attracted significant interest from both academia and industry. Wake steering consists in misaligning an upstream turbine to redirect its wake, mitigating its impact on downstream turbines. Implementing these strategies on real-time systems presents challenges, especially in collaborative research projects, for example because of the handling of confidential operational data and the complexity of deploying source code on proprietary hardware. This paper introduces a MATLAB-based framework designed to facilitate the development, deployment, and testing of wake steering strategies on real-time Bachmann PLC systems. The modular architecture of the framework is designed to address common challenges in research projects, such as model deployment, data confidentiality, adaptability to runtime changes, and more in general for the facilitation of multi-partner collaborations. The framework was used to perform multiple wake steering experiments on two 3.5 MW turbines.