Abstract
In this work, we investigate the impact of different wind farm control techniques on the structural design of a 10MW reference wind turbine. Active wake mixing and wake redirection have been recently proposed as a way to reduce wake-turbine interference in a wind farm and both show potential for improving the overall power production. However, such controllers modify the dynamic behaviour of the individual turbine, so that a thorough assessment of the resulting loads and displacements becomes necessary. In fact, as most wind turbines are designed according to international standards, one or more structural constraints are active on the final design, meaning that an increase of the sizing loads, or deflections, would make necessary to modify the structural layout. To investigate these aspects, we compare three redesigns of the same rotor: the first is equipped with a standard controller, while the second and the third integrate different wind farm controllers. All the solutions are optimized with our in-house design tool so that the three configurations emerge from the same design process. Results are then compared in terms of ultimate and fatigue loads, displacements and blade mass.
Highlights
A fundamental problem in wind farms (WFs) is the interaction between the individual wind turbine (WT) and one or more wakes coming from upwind turbines
In this work we study how the two proposed wind farm controllers (WFC) methodologies affect the operational spectra of a reference wind turbine, in order to understand if the driving loads and displacements are modified when a certain controller is adopted
In the active wake mixing (AWM) case, the redesign equipped with the wind farm control leads to a 14.6% increase of the blade root load, while the hub load has increased of about 4% (due to Design Load Cases (DLCs) 2.2(f)) and the tower top is about 7% higher than the baseline
Summary
A fundamental problem in wind farms (WFs) is the interaction between the individual wind turbine (WT) and one or more wakes coming from upwind turbines. Controllers based on wake redirection (WR) modify the yaw angle of the turbines in front in order to re-direct their wakes and steer them away from downstream turbines In this context, a recent work by Fleming et al [4] highlights the potential of WR techniques by measuring a 4% net increase in the overall energy production of a real WF in which some of the turbines are equipped with such controllers. A recent work by Fleming et al [4] highlights the potential of WR techniques by measuring a 4% net increase in the overall energy production of a real WF in which some of the turbines are equipped with such controllers Another recent work by Raach et al [5] presents a feedforward-feedback WR approach to compute optimal yaw angles and improve the performance of a test WF. Another promising family of controllers is based on the active wake mixing (AWM) introduced by Goit
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