Abstracted/indexed

Wind turbine wake recovery is very sensitive to ambient atmospheric conditions. This paper presents a way of including a local turbulence intensity estimation from SCADA into the Jensen wake model to improve its accuracy. This new model procedure is used to optimize power production of an operating wind farm and shows that some gains can be expected even if uncertainties remain high. These optimized settings are to be implemented in a field test campaign in the scope of the SMARTEOLE project.

Over the past few decades, single-rotor wind turbines have increased in size with the blades being extended toward lengths of 100 m. An alternative upscaling of turbines can be achieved by using multi-rotor wind turbines. In this article, measurements and numerical simulations of a utility-scale four-rotor wind turbine show that rotor interaction leads to increased energy production and faster wake recovery; these findings may allow for the design of wind farms with improved energy production.

Wake steering is a form of wind farm control in which turbines use yaw offsets to affect wakes in order to yield an increase in total energy production. In this first phase of a study of wake steering at a commercial wind farm, two turbines implement a schedule of offsets. For two closely spaced turbines, an approximate 14 % increase in energy was measured on the downstream turbine over a 10° sector, with a 4 % increase in energy production of the combined turbine pair.