<p>The development of wind energy is blooming in recent decades. Among various research areas with respect to the wind turbines and wind power generation such as aerodynamics of blades, heat transfer on power generators and control optimization on grid connection, wind farm layout optimization (WFLO) is playing an indispensable role. Traditionally, the wind turbines in a wind farm with a regular shape are placed aligned, but the wake effects behind the wind turbine rotors lead to farm wide power loss which demands a wind farm layout optimization. The WFLO studies aim to develop optimization methods to find the optimal solution for the wind turbine sittings based on current methods of wake calculation and optimization algorithms to maximize the power production or to minimize the cost of energy. The Flow Redirection and Induction in Steady state (FLORIS) is designed and released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to predict the steady-state wake locations and the distribution of flow velocities at each turbine. This paper presents comparison results with respect to the performance of FLORIS wake models on WFLO problems. The authors apply Jensen, multi-zone and Gaussian Curl Hybrid wake models in FLORIS on solving the wind speed distribution in wind farms and used a gradient-based optimization algorithm as the optimizer to find the optimal solutions. Annual Energy Production (AEP) is set as the objective function for the optimization work in this paper. Once the optimal solution is collected, other wake models are applied on the layout solution to calculate AEP and farm efficiency is found for the comparison studies. Three different cases from literature (Grady et al., 2005) with various wind conditions are considered. The wind turbines are placed in a square domain with a length of 1.8 kilometers. The numbers of wind turbines are 30, 30 and 39 in each study case, respectively and the wind conditions remain the same as Grady’s paper. The results indicate the necessity of using a high fidelity wake model for getting optimal solutions. Applying low-fidelity wake models may lead to instability in obtaining good results. The performances are various due to the difference in initial conditions, which illustrates that the quality of initial layout matters in WFLO problems. However, the expensive time cost of high-fidelity wake models should be taken into account while doing optimization calculations for large wind farms. This paper provides a reference for the studies which prepare to use FLORIS wake models on WFLO problems to select an appropriate model for their particular cases.</p>

A Comparative Study of the Influence of Different Wake Models on Wind Farm Layout Optimization

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ES/ES2021/volume/84881

ASME 2021 Energy Sustainability (ES2021)

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