Study of three wake control strategies for power maximization of offshore wind farms with different layouts

Abstract

The wake regulation by cooperative yaw control, axis induction control, or their combination can significantly improve the total power output of wind farms. However, a comprehensive study of the three control strategies is still lacking, which hinders their engineering applications. To this end, the optimized yaw angles, induction factors, and total power promotion are systematically compared for the three control strategies on both a regularly arranged wind farm and an irregularly arranged realistic offshore wind farm. The results indicate that all the three strategies work similarly to achieve a net power gain by enhancing the power output of the downstream turbines while slightly downgrading the upstream turbines. For the regularly arranged wind farm, very notable power promotions are obtained in the aligned direction, and all the three control strategies show similar performance, but the promotions almost disappear with a small misalignment. In contrast, power promotion is less sensitive to the wind direction for the irregularly arranged wind farm. The promotion of the yaw control is much more predominate than that of the induction control, and the combined control only slightly outperforms the single yaw control in the realistic wind farm. In the prevailing wind direction, the total power of the realistic wind farm can be increased by 2.1% by the combined control strategy under the wind speed of 6 m/s.