Dynamic soaring in wind turbine wakes

Abstract

Dynamic soaring for UAVs is a flight technique that enables continuous, powerless periodic flight patterns in the presence of a wind gradient. However, sufficiently large wind gradients are uncommon over land, while at offshore locations the largest wind gradients are located close to the ocean surface, thereby limiting the scope of practical application. An intrinsic feature of wind turbines is that they inherently produce very sharp wind gradients in the near wake. Therefore, in this paper, we propose and investigate periodic stationary dynamic soaring trajectories in the near wake of wind turbines. We additionally consider the potential of dynamic soaring for revitalizing the wind turbine wake. To this end, we apply periodic optimal control based on a simplified model for the glider dynamics and the wind profile in the wake. The cost function maximizes the revitalization of the wake. We compute optimal orbits for a range of different wing spans and different mass-scaling assumptions. The largest glider configuration, with a wingspan of 10 m and a mass of 222.6 kg, achieves a wake revitalization of about 0.94% of the total turbine thrust.