Numerical Study of Yawed Wind Turbine Under Unstable Atmospheric Boundary Layer Flows

Author(s):  
Dezhi Wei ◽  
Decheng Wan

Abstract Turbine-wake interactions among wind turbine array significantly affect the efficiency of wind farms. Yaw angle control is one of the potential ways to increase the total power generation of wind plants, but the sensitivity of such control strategy to atmospheric stability is rarely studied. In the present work, large-eddy simulation of a two-turbine configuration under convective atmospheric boundary layer is performed, with different yaw angles for the front one, the effect of turbine induced forces on the flow field is modeled by actuator line. Emphasis is placed on wake characteristics and aerodynamic performance. Simulation results reveal that atmospheric stability has a considerable impact on the behavior of wind turbine, wake deflection on the horizontal hub height plane for yawed wind turbine is relatively small, compared with the result of the empirical wake model proposed for wind turbine operating in the neutral stratification, which is attributed to the higher ambient turbulence intensity and large variance of wind direction in the convective condition. And associated with the smaller wake deflection, the total power production does not increase as expected when yawing the upstream turbine. In addition, due to the existence of great quantities of disorganized coherent turbulent structures in the unstable condition, the yaw bearing moment experienced by the downstream wind turbine increases dramatically, even if the rotor plane of the first turbine is perpendicular to the inflow direction.

Wind Energy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 1165-1180
Author(s):  
Taiwo A. Adedipe ◽  
Ashvinkumar Chaudhari ◽  
Tuomo Kauranne

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Stidworthy ◽  
David Carruthers

Abstract. A new model, FLOWSTAR-Energy, has been developed for the practical calculation of wind farm energy production. It includes a semi-analytic model for airflow over complex surfaces (FLOWSTAR) and a wind turbine wake model that simulates wake-wake interaction by exploiting some similarities between the decay of a wind turbine wake and the dispersion of plume of passive gas emitted from an elevated source. Additional turbulence due to the wind shear at the wake edge is included and the assumption is made that wind turbines are only affected by wakes from upstream wind turbines. The model takes account of the structure of the atmospheric boundary layer, which means that the effect of atmospheric stability is included. A marine boundary layer scheme is also included to enable offshore as well as onshore sites to be modelled. FLOWSTAR-Energy has been used to model three different wind farms and the predicted energy output compared with measured data. Maps of wind speed and turbulence have also been calculated for two of the wind farms. The Tjaæreborg wind farm is an onshore site consisting of a single 2 MW wind turbine, the NoordZee offshore wind farm consists of 36 V90 VESTAS 3 MW turbines and the Nysted offshore wind farm consists of 72 Bonus 2.3 MW turbines. The NoordZee and Nysted measurement datasets include stability distribution data, which was included in the modelling. Of the two offshore wind farm datasets, the Noordzee dataset focuses on a single 5-degree wind direction sector and therefore only represents a limited number of measurements (1,284); whereas the Nysted dataset captures data for seven 5-degree wind direction sectors and represents a larger number of measurements (84,363). The best agreement between modelled and measured data was obtained with the Nysted dataset, with high correlation (0.98 or above) and low normalised mean square error (0.007 or below) for all three flow cases. The results from Tjæreborg show that the model replicates the Gaussian shape of the wake deficit two turbine diameters downstream of the turbine, but the lack of stability information in this dataset makes it difficult to draw conclusions about model performance. One of the key strengths of FLOWSTAR-Energy is its ability to model the effects of complex terrain on the airflow. However, although the airflow model has been previously compared extensively with flow data, it has so far not been used in detail to predict energy yields from wind farms in complex terrain. This will be the subject of a further validation study for FLOWSTAR-Energy.


2019 ◽  
pp. 0309524X1988092
Author(s):  
Mohamed Marouan Ichenial ◽  
Abdellah El-Hajjaji ◽  
Abdellatif Khamlichi

The assessment of climatological site conditions, airflow characteristics, and the turbulence affecting wind turbines is an important phase in developing wake engineering models. A method of modeling atmospheric boundary layer structure under atmospheric stability effects is crucial for accurate evaluation of the spatial scale of modern wind turbines, but by themselves, they are incapable to account for the varying large-scale weather conditions. As a result, combining lower atmospheric models with mesoscale models is required. In order to realize a reasonable approximation of initial atmospheric inflow condition used for wake identification behind an NREL 5-MW wind turbine, different vertical wind profile models on equilibrium conditions are tested and evaluated in this article. Wind farm simulator solvers require massive computing resources and forcing mechanisms tendencies inputs from weather forecast models. A three-dimensional Flow Redirection and Induction in Steady-state engineering model was developed for simulating and optimizing the wake losses of different rows of wind turbines under different stability stratifications. The obtained results were compared to high-fidelity simulation data generated by the famous Simulator for Wind Farm Applications. This work showed that a significant improvement related to atmospheric boundary layer structure can be made to develop accurate engineering wake models in order to reduce wake losses.


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