Validation of wind turbine wake environment modelling

Abstract

The widely used wake environment models in engineering are validated according to wind tunnel experiment in this paper, namely the Jensen wake model, Frandsen wake model, the Larsen wake model and simplified vortex wake model. From the validation results, it can be found that the wake expansion are overestimated, namely the expansion efficient still needs to be further investigated. In Jensen and Frandsen models, the assumption of uniform distribution of wake speeds along radius differs from the experimental data, with low precision. The wake speed with an approximate Gaussian distribution adopted by Larsen model improves the accuracy. But for all these wake models, due to the overestimation of wake expansion, the wake profiles are definitely calculated with error, thereby lowering the precision of power prediction of wind farms. It is suggested that these models needs to be improved based on more measurement/experimental data.