Investigating the Impact of Atmospheric Conditions on Wake-Steering Performance at a Commercial Wind Plant

Eric Simley, Mithu Debnath, Paul Fleming

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

9 Scopus Citations

Abstract

Wake steering is a wind farm control strategy in which upstream wind turbines are misaligned with the wind to deflect their wakes away from downstream turbines, thereby increasing net energy production. But research suggests that the effectiveness of wake steering strongly depends on atmospheric conditions such as stability. In this paper, we investigate results from a two-turbine wake-steering experiment at a commercial wind plant to assess the impact of stability and five other atmospheric variables on wake-steering performance. Specifically, for different atmospheric condition bins we compare the ability of the controller to achieve the intended yaw offsets, the power gain from wake steering, and the reduction in wake losses. Further, we analyze wake-steering performance as a function of wind speed to eliminate the confounding impact of different wind speed distributions in different atmospheric conditions. Overall, we find that wind direction standard deviation is the best predictor of wake-steering performance, followed by turbulence intensity and turbulent kinetic energy. The results suggest the importance of adapting wake-steering control strategies to different atmospheric conditions.

Original languageAmerican English
Article numberArticle No. 032097
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Physics: Conference Series
Volume2265
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2 Jun 2022
Event2022 Science of Making Torque from Wind, TORQUE 2022 - Delft, Netherlands
Duration: 1 Jun 20223 Jun 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/JA-5000-82125

Keywords

  • atmospheric stability
  • turbulence
  • wake steering
  • Wind farm control

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