Abstract
Abstract. Wake redirection is an active wake control (AWC) concept that is known to have a high potential for increasing the overall power production of wind farms. Being based on operating the turbines with intentional yaw misalignment to steer wakes away from downstream turbines, this control strategy requires careful attention to the load implications. However, the computational effort required to perform an exhaustive analysis of the site-specific loads on each turbine in a wind farm is unacceptably high due to the huge number of aeroelastic simulations required to cover all possible inflow and yaw conditions. To reduce this complexity, a practical load modeling approach is based on “gridding”, i.e., performing simulations only for a subset of the range of environmental and operational conditions that can occur. Based on these simulations, a multi-dimensional lookup table (LUT) can be constructed containing the fatigue and extreme loads on all components of interest. Using interpolation, the loads on each turbine in the farm can the be predicted for the whole range of expected conditions. Recent studies using this approach indicate that wake redirection can increase the overall power production of the wind farm and at the same time decrease the lifetime fatigue loads on the main components of the individual turbines. As the present level of risk perception related to operation with large yaw misalignment is still substantial, it is essential to increase the confidence level in this LUT-based load modeling approach to further derisk the wake redirection strategy. To this end, this paper presents the results of a series of studies focused on the validation of different aspects of the LUT load modeling approach. These studies are based on detailed aeroelastic simulations, two wind tunnel tests, and a full-scale field test. The results indicate that the LUT approach is a computationally efficient methodology for assessing the farm loads under AWC, which achieves generally good prediction of the load trends.
Highlights
When wind turbines are grouped into wind farms, they affect each other’s performance through their wakes
This paper presented the results of a number of studies focused on the validation of the lookup table (LUT) approach to modeling the loads on turbines in wind farms
The validation studies included conventional (BEM) and detailed simulations, data from two wind tunnel measurements performed under yaw misalignment, and full-scale field measurements
Summary
When wind turbines are grouped into wind farms, they affect each other’s performance through their wakes. For given inflow conditions in front of a specific wind turbine in a wind farm, calculated using a wake model such as FarmFlow (Özdemir and Bot, 2018), the loads on the turbine’s components are interpolated from the load LUT. This LUT-based approach is very attractive as it saves a huge amount of computational time when constructing predictions of the lifetime fatigue loads for each individual turbine for a specific site. Evaluate if the LUT load model predictions can be generalized for different turbine scales To this end, a series of validations studies have been performed based on detailed simulations, wind tunnel measurements, and full-scale field tests. The paper continues with a detailed explanation of the load modeling approach and concludes in Sect. 6 with some final remarks
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