Field measurements of wake meandering at a utility-scale wind turbine with nacelle-mounted Doppler lidars

Abstract

Abstract. Wake meandering is a low-frequency oscillation of the entire wind turbine wake that can contribute to power and load fluctuations of downstream turbines in wind farms. Field measurements of two Doppler lidars mounted on the nacelle of a utility-scale wind turbine were used to investigate relationships between the inflow and the wake meandering as well as the effect of wake meandering on the temporally averaged wake. A correlation analysis showed a linear relationship between the instantaneous wake position and the lateral velocity that degraded with the evolution of the turbulent wind field during the time of downstream advection. A low-pass filter proportional to the advection time delay is recommended to remove small scales that become decorrelated even for distances within the typical spacing of wind turbine rows in a wind farm. The results also showed that the velocity at which wake meandering is transported downstream was slower than the inflow wind speed but faster than the velocity at the wake centre. This indicates that the modelling assumption of the wake as a passive scalar should be revised in the context of the downstream advection. Further, the strength of wake meandering increased linearly with the turbulence intensity of the lateral velocity and with the downstream distance. Wake meandering reduced the maximum velocity deficit of the temporally averaged wake and increased its width. Both effects scaled with the wake meandering strength. Lastly, we found that the fraction of the wake turbulence intensity that was caused by wake meandering decreased with downstream distance contrary to the wake meandering strength.