A Model to Calculate Fatigue Damage Caused by Partial Waking During Wind Farm Optimization

Wind turbines in wind farms often operate in waked or partially waked conditions, which can greatly increase the fatigue damage. Some fatigue considerations may be included, but currently a full fidelity analysis of the increased damage a turbine experiences in a wind farm is not considered in wind farm layout optimization because existing models are too computationally expensive. In this paper, we present a model to calculate fatigue damage caused by partial waking on a wind turbine that is computationally efficient and can be included in wind farm layout optimization. The model relies on analytic velocity, turbulence, and loads models commonly used in farm research and design, and captures some of the effects of turbulence on the fatigue loading. Compared to high-fidelity simulation data, our model accurately predicts the damage trends of various waking conditions. We also perform example wind farm layout optimizations with our presented model in which we maximize the annual energy production (AEP) of a wind farm while constraining the damage of the turbines in the farm. The results of our optimization show that the turbine damage can be significantly reduced, more than 10%, with only a small sacrifice of around 0.07% to the AEP, or the damage can be reduced by 20% with an AEP sacrifice of 0.6%.