Jennifer Annoni

Evaluating wake models for wind farm control

Wind turbines are typically operated to maximize their own performance without considering the impact of wake effects on nearby turbines. There is the potential to increase total power and reduce structural loads by properly coordinating the individual turbines in a wind farm. The effective design and analysis of such coordinated controllers requires turbine wake models of sufficient accuracy but low computational complexity. This paper first formulates a coordinated control problem for a two-turbine array. Next, the paper reviews several existing simulation tools that range from low-fidelity, quasi-static models to high-fidelity, computational fluid dynamic models. These tools are compared by evaluating the power, loads, and flow characteristics for the coordinated two-turbine array. The results in this paper highlight the advantages and disadvantages of existing wake models for design and analysis of coordinated wind farm controllers.

A tutorial on control-oriented modeling and control of wind farms

Wind turbines are often sited together in wind farms as it is economically advantageous. However, the wake inevitably created by every turbine will lead to a time-varying interaction between the individual turbines. Common practice in industry has been to control turbines individually and ignore this interaction while optimizing the power and loads of the individual turbines. However, turbines that are in a wake experience reduced wind speed and increased turbulence, leading to a reduced energy extraction and increased dynamic mechanical loads on the turbine, respectively. Neglecting the dynamic interaction between turbines in control will therefore lead to suboptimal behaviour of the total wind farm. Therefore, wind farm control has been receiving an increasing amount of attention over the past years, with the focus on increasing the total power production and reducing the dynamic loading on the turbines. In this paper, wind farm control-oriented modeling and control concepts are explained. In addition, recent developments and literature are discussed and categorized. This paper can serve as a source of background information and provides many references regarding control-oriented modeling and control of wind farms.

Full-Scale Field Test of Wake Steering

Wind farm control, in which turbine controllers are coordinated to improve farmwide performance, is an active field of research. One form of wind farm control is wake steering, in which a turbine is yawed to the inflow to redirect its wake away from downstream turbines. Wake steering has been studied in depth in simulations as well as in wind tunnels and scaled test facilities. This work performs a field test of wake steering on a full-scale turbine. In the campaign, the yaw controller of the turbine has been set to track different yaw misalignment set points while a nacelle-mounted lidar scans the wake at several ranges downwind. The lidar measurements are combined with turbine data, as well as measurements of the inflow made by a highly instrumented meteorological mast. These measurements are then compared to the predictions of a wind farm control-oriented model of wakes.

Detailed field test of yaw-based wake steering

This paper describes a detailed field-test campaign to investigate yaw-based wake steering. In yaw-based wake steering, an upstream turbine intentionally misaligns its yaw with respect to the inflow to deflect its wake away from a downstream turbine, with the goal of increasing total power production. In the first phase, a nacelle-mounted scanning lidar was used to verify wake deflection of a misaligned turbine and calibrate wake deflection models. In the second phase, these models were used within a yaw controller to achieve a desired wake deflection. This paper details the experimental design and setup. All data collected as part of this field experiment will be archived and made available to the public via the U.S. Department of Energys Atmosphere to Electrons Data Archive and Portal.

Wind farm flow modeling using an input-output reduced-order model

Wind turbines in a wind farm operate individually to maximize their own power regardless of the impact of aerodynamic interactions on neighboring turbines. There is the potential to increase power and reduce overall structural loads by properly coordinating turbines. To perform control design and analysis, a model needs to be of low computational cost, but retains the necessary dynamics seen in high-fidelity models. The objective of this work is to obtain a reduced-order model that represents the full-order flow computed using a high-fidelity model. A variety of methods, including proper orthogonal decomposition and dynamic mode decomposition, can be used to extract the dominant flow structures and obtain a reduced-order model. In this paper, we combine proper orthogonal decomposition with a system identification technique to produce an input-output reduced-order model. This technique is used to construct a reduced-order model of the flow within a two-turbine array computed using a large-eddy simulation.

A low-order model for wind farm control

Wind turbines in a wind farm are operated individually to maximize their own power regardless of the impact of aerodynamic interactions on neighboring turbines. There is the potential to increase power and reduce overall structural loads by properly coordinating the turbines. To perform control design and analysis, a model needs to be of low computational complexity but retain the necessary dynamics seen in high-fidelity models. This paper addresses a model reduction approach that computes the dominant modes of the flow that capture the energy and frequency characteristics of the system. Specifically, the paper uses the balanced proper orthogonal decomposition technique to construct the dominant input/output modes. Using these modes, a low-order model of a wind farm is constructed that can be used for control design.

Assessment of wind turbine component loads under yaw-offset conditions

Renewed interest in yaw control for wind turbine and power plants for wake redirection and load mitigation demands a clear understanding of the effects of running with skewed inflow. In this paper, we investigate the physics of yawed operations, building up the complexity from a simplified analytical treatment to more complex aeroelastic simulations. Results in terms of damage equivalent loads (DELs) and extreme loads under misaligned conditions of operation are compared to data collected from an instrumented, utility-scale wind turbine. The analysis shows that multiple factors are responsible for the DELs of the various components and that airfoil aerodynamics, elastic characteristics of the rotor, and turbulence intensities are the primary drivers. Both fatigue and extreme loads are observed to have relatively complex trends with yaw offsets, which can change depending on the wind-speed regime. Good agreement is found between predicted and measured trends for both fatigue and ultimate loads.

Optimization Under Uncertainty for Wake Steering Strategies

Wind turbines in a wind power plant experience significant power losses because of aerodynamic interactions between turbines. One control strategy to reduce these losses is known as “wake steering,” in which upstream turbines are yawed to direct wakes away from downstream turbines. Previous wake steering research has assumed perfect information, however, there can be significant uncertainty in many aspects of the problem, including wind inflow and various turbine measurements. Uncertainty has significant implications for performance of wake steering strategies. Consequently, the authors formulate and solve an optimization under uncertainty (OUU) problem for finding optimal wake steering strategies in the presence of yaw angle uncertainty. The OUU wake steering strategy is demonstrated on a two-turbine test case and on the utility-scale, offshore Princess Amalia Wind Farm. When we accounted for yaw angle uncertainty in the Princess Amalia Wind Farm case, inflow-direction-specific OUU solutions produced between 0% and 1.4% more power than the deterministically optimized steering strategies, resulting in an overall annual average improvement of 0.2%. More importantly, the deterministic optimization is expected to perform worse and with more downside risk than the OUU result when realistic uncertainty is taken into account. Additionally, the OUU solution produces fewer extreme yaw situations than the deterministic solution.

Wind farm modeling and control using dynamic mode decomposition

The objective of this paper is to construct a low-order model of a wind farm that can be used for control design and analysis. There is a potential to use wind farm control to increase power and reduce overall structural loads by properly coordinating the turbines in a wind farm. To perform control design and analysis, a model of the wind farm needs to be constructed that has low computational complexity, but retains the necessary dynamics. This paper uses an extension of dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) to extract the dominant spatial and temporal information from computational fluid dynamic simulations. Specifically, this extension of DMD includes input/output information and relies on techniques from the subspace identification literature. Using this information, a low-order model of a wind farm is constructed that can be used for control design.

Field test of wake steering at an offshore wind farm

In this paper, a field test of wake steering control is presented. The field test is the result of a collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Envision Energy, a smart energy management company and turbine manufacturer. In the campaign, an array of turbines within an operating commercial offshore wind farm in China have the normal yaw controller modified to implement wake steering according to a yaw control strategy. The strategy was designed 5 using NREL wind farm models, including a computational fluid dynamics model, SOWFA, for understanding wake dynamics and an engineering model, FLORIS, for yaw control optimization. Results indicate that, within the certainty afforded by the data, the wake-steering controller was successful in increasing power capture, by amounts similar to those predicted from the models.