High resolution wind turbine wake measurements with a scanning lidar

T G Herges,B T Naughton,D C Maniaci,M Sjöholm,T Mikkelsen

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/854/1/012021

T G Herges, B T Naughton + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/854/1/012021

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Abstract

High-resolution lidar wake measurements are part of an ongoing field campaign being conducted at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology facility by Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory using a customized scanning lidar from the Technical University of Denmark. One of the primary objectives is to collect experimental data to improve the predictive capability of wind plant computational models to represent the response of the turbine wake to varying inflow conditions and turbine operating states. The present work summarizes the experimental setup and illustrates several wake measurement example cases. The cases focus on demonstrating the impact of the atmospheric conditions on the wake shape and position, and exhibit a sample of the data that has been made public through the Department of Energy Atmosphere to Electrons Data Archive and Portal.

Highlights

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are conducting an experiment at the SNL Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility located in Lubbock, Texas [1, 2] to investigate the use of wind turbine yaw control to direct wakes for increased wind plant performance [3,4,5]
The baseline SWiFT facility has well-instrumented meteorological towers and research turbines, but in order to adequately measure the turbine wakes, the team partnered with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Wind Energy Department to leverage their wake measurement expertise and their custom-built SpinnerLidar instrument, which is uniquely capable of measuring wakes at the temporal and spatial resolution required for the experiment [6,7,8]
The focus of this paper is to provide a few sample cases that demonstrate the impact of the atmospheric conditions on the wake shape and position, and exhibit some of the data that is available through the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmosphere to electron (A2e) Data Archive and Portal (DAP) as part of the current experimental campaign [10]

Summary

Introduction

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are conducting an experiment at the SNL Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility located in Lubbock, Texas [1, 2] to investigate the use of wind turbine yaw control to direct wakes for increased wind plant performance [3,4,5]. Long-term continuous measurements of the wake velocity profile downwind of the turbine are needed to obtain a statistical representation. The methodology for this effort is based on a formal Verification and Validation (V&V) framework developed for the U.S Department of Energy (DOE) Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e) initiative. This V&V framework is being used for the development and execution of a coordinated simulation and experimental program to assess the predictive capability of computational models of complex systems through focused, well structured, and formal processes [9]

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