Abstract. Presently there is a lack of data revealing the behaviour of the path followed by the near wake of full scale wind turbines and its dependence on yaw misalignment. Here we present an experimental analysis of the horizontal wake deviation of a 5 MW offshore wind turbine between 0.6 and 1.4 diameters downstream. The wake field has been scanned with a short range lidar and the wake path has been reconstructed by means of two-dimensional Gaussian tracking. We analysed the measurements for rotor yaw misalignments arising in normal operation and during partial load, representing high thrust coefficient conditions. We classified distinctive wake paths with reference to yaw misalignment, based on the nacelle wind vane, in steps of 3° in a range of ±10.5°. All paths observed in the nacelle frame of reference showed a consistent convergence towards 0.9 rotor diameters downstream suggesting a kind of wake deviation delay. This contrasts with published results from wind tunnels which in general report a convergence towards the rotor. The discrepancy is evidenced in particular in a comparison which we performed against published paths obtained by means of tip vortex tracking.
An experimental study on the effects of winglets on the tip vortex interaction in the near wake of a model wind turbine