Dynamic wake steering and its impact on wind farm power production and yaw actuator duty

Abstract

Wake redirection is a wind farm control strategy that aims at increasing the overall power yield of a wind farm. It involves intentional misalignment of the rotors of upstream wind turbines with respect to the wind direction, thereby diverting their wakes aside from downstream turbines. The yaw misalignment angles are typically optimized using static wake models. In real-life, due to the rapid fluctuations of the wind direction with time, the optimized yaw misalignment angles cannot be instantaneously tracked as this would inevitably require an unacceptable amount of rotor yawing. This work is focused on how to dynamically adapt the statically optimzied yaw misalignment angles to achieve a good balance between high energy gain and limited yaw actuator duty cycle.