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Wind turbines arranged in a wind plant impact each other through their wakes. Wind plant control is an active research field that attempts to improve wind plant performance by coordinating control of individual turbines to take into account these turbine–wake interactions. In this paper, high‐fidelity simulations of a two‐turbine fully waked scenario are used to investigate several wake mitigation strategies, including modification of yaw and tilt angles of an upstream turbine to induce wake skew, as well as repositioning of the downstream turbine. The simulation results are compared through change relative to a baseline operation in terms of overall power capture and loading on the upstream and downstream turbine. Results demonstrated improved power production for all methods. Analysis of control options, including individual pitch control, shows potential to minimize the increase of, or even reduce, turbine loads.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Large-eddy simulations of atmospheric boundary layers under various stability and surface roughness conditions are performed to investigate the turbulence impact on wind turbines. In particular, the aeroelastic responses of the turbines are studied to characterize the fatigue loading of the turbulence present in the boundary layer and in the wake of the turbines. Two utility-scale 5 MW turbines that are separated by seven rotor diameters are placed in a 3 km by 3 km by 1 km domain. They are subjected to atmospheric turbulent boundary layer flow and data are collected on the structural response of the turbine components. The surface roughness was found to increase the fatigue loads while the atmospheric instability had a small influence. Furthermore, the downstream turbines yielded higher fatigue loads indicating that the turbulent wakes generated from the upstream turbines have significant impact.

SOWFA + Super Controller is a modification of the NREL's SOWFA tool that allows for a user to apply multi-turbine or centralized wind plant control algorithms within the high-fidelity SOWFA simulation environment. The tool is currently a branch of the main SOWFA program, but will one day will be merged into a single version.This manual introduces the tool and provides examples such that a user can implement their own super controller and set up and run simulations. The manual provides a summary of SOWFA to allow for the customization of controllers and running of simulations. The details of SOWFA are reported elsewhere Lee 2013, andChurchfield et al. 2012).

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