Preface

Abstract

The eighth Wake Conference, held between 20th and 22nd of June 2023, marks nearly a decade and a half of successful international conferences focused on advancements in the field of wake dynamics. This bi-annual conference, held for the past decade on the island of Gotland, Sweden seeks to aid in this by providing a venue for scientists and PhD students working in the field of wake dynamics to come together and share their research and expertise.To understand the need for this conference one only needs to look to modern wind farms. These massive energy facilities rival the production of a nuclear power plant and consist of dozens or potentially hundreds of individual wind turbines. The numbers of turbines involved make it unavoidable that they will invariably be impacted by the wakes of upstream turbines. This wake interaction results in a decreased power production, caused by the lower kinetic energy in the wind, and an increase in the turbulence intensity. This decrease in power emphases the importance of understanding the physical nature of vortices and their dynamics in the wake of a turbine when designing the layout of these immense wind farms. The clear importance of farm design, and the related interest in the field of wake and wind farm aerodynamics, can be seen in the growing number of scientific articles on the subject.Further, in order to make a substantial impact on one of the most significant challenges of our time - global climate change - the wind industry’s growth must continue. A part of making this growth possible, and to solve some of the scientific problems of doing so, will require research into the different areas of the physics of wind turbine and wind farm wakes. To this end, the conference covers the following subject areas: Wake and vortex dynamics, instabilities in trailing vortices and wakes, simulation and measurements of wakes, analytical approaches for modeling wakes, wake interaction along with other wind farm investigations.We would like to thank all those that assisted in the review process for the 55 papers which constitute the proceedings of the Wake Conference 2023 that were selected to be published. We are also thankful for the help we have received from the editorial team at IOP Publishing during the process.Visby, Sweden June 2023 The Organizers, Professor Stefan Ivanell, Uppsala University Professor Jens Nørkær Sørensen, Technical University of Denmark List of Editorial Committee are available in the pdf.