FLORIDyn - A dynamic and flexible framework for real-time wind farm control

Abstract

This paper presents a new framework of the FLOw Redirection and Induction Dynamics (FLORIDyn) model. It is able to dynamically simulate the wake behaviour in wind farms under heterogeneous and changing environmental conditions at a low computational cost. The novelty of this work is the improved segregation of wake dynamics and wake influence: the framework creates Observation Points (OPs) at each turbine, which propagate wind field states and turbine states downstream and follow the wind direction of the free stream velocity. These observation points cover the dynamic aspects of the simulation. The OPs, along with the stored states, are now used to derive so-called Temporary Wind Farms (TWF), which approximate the effective intra-farm wind conditions at a given location. Within these TWF, the flow conditions are homogeneous and steady state. This way, arbitrary wake models can be used to calculate the farm influence on the location. The FLORIDyn framework also provides interfaces to flow field estimators, which is tested with an effective wind speed estimator. A nine turbine case is used to highlight the quality and performance of the simulation result. Compared to its predecessor, the new FLORIDyn framework decreases the computational cost by one to two orders of magnitude, which makes it a promising candidate for real-time model predictive dynamic wind farm control.