Study of cooperative wake control for multiple wind turbines under variable wind speeds/directions

Abstract

In the wind farm control field, wind turbines are normally manipulated to maximize the individual power production which is named the greedy control. However, this greedy control method can lead to massive losses of total wind farm power production, mainly caused by the wake interference between multiple wind turbines. To this end, the cooperative wake control, which seeks the maximum total power production by coordinating each individual wind turbine at the global optimum operation point, can greatly improve the wind farm output performance. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of two different cooperative wake control strategies, i.e., instantaneous control and wind-interval based (WIB) control under variable wind speeds/directions scenario. These two cooperative control strategies are achieved based on the power de-rating operation to the upstream wind turbines. Taking three in-line wind turbines as an example, the control parameters of the two upstream wind turbines are cooperatively optimized while the downstream third wind turbine operates at the maximum power coefficient. To account for the multiple wind turbines wake interference, an artificial neural network (ANN) wake model characterized by the fast computational efficiency and great accuracy, in combination with the best wake superposition model chosen to quantify multiple wake effect, is proposed for the control optimization. By comparing to the baseline greedy control, it shows that both cooperative control strategies are effective in improving the power production of the wind farm. More specifically, the WIB control can maintain the power production at the same level of instantaneous control with a maximum difference less than 3%, while it reduces the operating difficulty to a large extent which greatly facilitates its application under realistic more complex wind scenarios.