Flow Control Leveraging Downwind Rotors for Improved Wind Power Plant Operation: Preprint

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract

Controlling the air flow within wind power plants has the potential to improve plant performance and is an active area of research in the wind energy control community. In order to develop, test, and tune wind power plant controllers efficiently, an accurate engineering model of the turbine wake dynamics is required. Two elements of flow control are wake steering via yaw and tilt of a turbine. When a turbine is yawed or tilted away from the incoming wind field, the wake shape is changed. This is largely due to shed vortices that produce a curled wake. In this work, the well-known wake engineering model FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State (FLORIS) wake engineering model is expanded to include these wake effects due to tilt. Since decay of these vortices has not been previously captured in an engineering model, the authors describe how vortices with decay have been added to FLORIS and how the updated model has been used to study the effects due to tilt in the wake. Results are demonstrated and compared to high-fidelity large-eddy simulations. Potential wind power plant performance gains due to flow control using tilt are investigated across different wind conditions and sites. Preliminary results show power gains by using tilt to implement flow control in a variety of wind distributions and tilt values.
Original languageAmerican English
Number of pages9
StatePublished - 2019
EventIEEE American Control Conference - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Duration: 10 Jul 201912 Jul 2019

Conference

ConferenceIEEE American Control Conference
CityPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania
Period10/07/1912/07/19

Bibliographical note

See NREL/CP-5000-75052 for paper as published in proceedings

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/CP-5000-73125

Keywords

  • FLORIS
  • flow control
  • performance
  • wind energy
  • wind farm

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