Study of aerodynamic performance and wake effects for offshore wind farm cluster

Abstract

The large-scale development of wind farms has led to an increase in the concentration of wind farms, due to factors such as concentrated wind resources, operational and maintenance costs. This has resulted in the formation of wind farm clusters, especially offshore wind farms. The wake and cluster effects of upstream wind farms have a significant impact on the power generation of downstream wind farms. In this study, the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) combined with actuator line model is used to simulate the flow field of a wind farm cluster under turbulence inflow conditions. The numerical methodology is first validated using data from the Nibe wind turbine. The wind farm cluster with NREL 5 MW wind turbine is then analyzed to examine the aerodynamic performance and wake effect for different wind farm cluster configurations. The results show that there is a clear wake and cluster effect for wind farm clusters, and that this effect reduces as the distance between wind farms increases, with 30D being a reasonable separation distance. The power of the wind farm still decreases when three wind farms are clustered, which is further reduced compared to two wind farms, indicating that the cluster effect becomes more severe as the number of wind farms increases. The study also found that staggering wind farms in a wind farm cluster can improve the overall power of the wind farm cluster.