Dynamic robust active wake control

Abstract

Abstract. Active Wake Control (AWC) is a strategy for operating wind farms in a way to maximize the overall power production and/or reduce structural loading on the wind turbines. Many recent studies indicate that this technology, and more specifically the so-called wake redirection approach to AWC, have a significant potential for increasing the annual energy production by up to a few percentage points. The current state-of-the-art approach is to optimize AWC for a range of static wind conditions, which is expected to perform sub-optimally in real-life due to the continuous variations of the wind resource and the very slow yaw dynamics of the turbines. Recent work has addressed this variability in a robust design setting with the focus on maximizing the energy capture (robust AWC). This paper continues on this line of research, and develops a dynamic robust AWC strategy that aims to optimize the balance between maximum power production (requiring increased level of yawing) and minimum loads on the yaw drive (requiring limited yaw motion). It is shown with a realistic case study that the developed dynamic robust AWC can result in a large reduction of the loading on the yaw drive while at the same time improving the overall power gain, as compared to the conventional nominal AWC.

Comparison of the Gaussian Wind Farm Model with Historical Data of Three Offshore Wind Farms

“…Hence, selecting those parameters is a nontrivial task. Kanev and Bot [43] make an interesting proposal to linearly correlate the two parameters, while worthwhile to pursue, this is out of our scope and not further explored in this article. Instead, we assume σ wd = 3.0 • and I ∞ = 0.06, which are common figures for offshore wind farms in the literature [44,45].…”