Numerical Validation of Wind Plant Control Strategies

Abstract

Abstract Research work carried out with the support of the CL-Windcon EU project where flow control strategies (flow redirection or yaw misalignment, and flow induction control or de-rating) are validated. These strategies were divided in optimizing a wind farm (WF) in terms of wind farm Annual Energy Production (AEP), and in optimizing the wind farm to reduce the worst Damage Equivalent Load (DEL) in blade root flap-wise moment that sees a wind turbine (WT) while keeping the WF AEP as high as possible. Two numerical methods were employed. A modified FLORIS that takes into account the DEL was used in the optimization process and the simulations, the baselines and the optimized configurations, were replicated with a higher fidelity method, SOWFA, to verify the lower fidelity tool results prior to implementation in a real system. From the studied cases, it has been found that the wake steering approaches maximized the total power by 6 to 15%, and the flow induction strategies, despite having a poor performance increasing of the overall power productions, showed their validity for reducing the flap-wise moment DEL of the WT blade. Numerically, SOWFA and FLORIS simulations showed significant discrepancies in partial wake conditions, which suggested a need of a new tuning of the FLORIS parameters for partial wake conditions. Finally, mention that now, thanks to EU CL-Windcon project there are publicly available experimental data, wind tunnel data, and SOWFA data that could be used for validation purpose.