Abstract
One of the crucial problems for wind farm (WF) development is wind farm layout optimization. It seeks to find the optimal positions of wind turbines (WTs) inside a WF, so as to maximize and/or minimize a single objective or multiple objectives, while satisfying certain constraints. Although this problem for WFs in flat terrain or offshore has been investigated in many studies, it is still a challenging problem for WFs in complex terrain. In this preliminary study, the wind flow conditions of complex terrain without WTs are first obtained from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, then an adapted Jensen wake model is developed by considering the terrain features and taking the inflow conditions as input. Using this combined method, the wake effects of WF in complex terrain are properly modelled. Besides, a random search (RS) algorithm proposed in previous study is improved by adding some adaptive mechanisms and applied to solve the layout optimization problem of a WF on a Gaussian shape hill. The layout of the WF with a certain number of WTs is optimized to maximize the total power output, which obtained steady improvements over expert guess layouts.
Highlights
As the main form of large scale wind energy utilization, wind farm (WF) have been built world widely, both onshore and offshore
The wind flow conditions of complex terrain without wind turbines (WTs) are first obtained from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, an adapted Jensen wake model is developed by considering the terrain features and taking the inflow conditions as input
Comparing with those built in flat terrain, WFs built in complex terrain benefit from richer wind resource brought by speed-up effects of hills, but they are exposed to more turbulent flow conditions, higher fatigue loads, more expensive installation, operation and maintenance costs, and other disadvantages [2]
Summary
As the main form of large scale wind energy utilization, WFs have been built world widely, both onshore and offshore. Several assumptions are made in the problem formulation, including: an ideal Gaussian shape hill and a square WF area are developed, neglecting the details of real complex terrain, such as local vegetation coverage, tree and forests; only two different wind directions are considered; the effects of turbulence, thermal atmospheric condition are neglected; identical WTs with same hub height are used and the number of WTs are fixed; the power production is determined by the wind speed at hub height combined with the power curve; economic considerations (such as WF cost, electricity selling), design of the WF civil and electrical infrastructure are not included
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