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Wind farm power optimization via yaw angle control: A wind tunnel study

Bastankhah, Majid; Porté-Agel, Fernando

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Authors

Fernando Porté-Agel



Abstract

Yaw angle control is known nowadays as a promising and effective technique to mitigate wake effects in wind farms. In this paper, we perform wind tunnel experiments to study the performance of a model wind farm with five turbine rows under a wide variety of yaw angle distributions. Electrical servo controllers are used to monitor and control the operating conditions of each model wind turbine, which consists of a recently developed, highly efficient rotor with a diameter of 15 cm. Each turbine is used as a sensor to detect its own inflow conditions. Using this method ensures us that all the turbines within the wind farm always operate with an optimal rotational velocity, regardless of their yaw angles or inflow conditions. Wind farm power measurements are carried out for more than 200 cases with different yaw angle distributions. Our results show that yaw angle control can increase the overall wind farm efficiency as much as 17% with respect to fully non-yawed conditions. Special emphasis is placed on studying yaw angle distributions with different levels of simplicity and power improvement. Among different yaw angle distributions, the most successful ones are those with a relatively large yaw angle value for the first turbine row, and then, the yaw angle decreases progressively for downwind rows until it eventually becomes zero for the last one. In addition, power measurements show that yaw angle control can improve the wind farm efficiency more noticeably for a larger number of turbine rows although this improvement is expected to reach a plateau after several rows.

Citation

Bastankhah, M., & Porté-Agel, F. (2019). Wind farm power optimization via yaw angle control: A wind tunnel study. Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, 11(2), Article 023301. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5077038

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 2, 2019
Online Publication Date Mar 8, 2019
Publication Date Mar 31, 2019
Deposit Date Mar 11, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy
Publisher American Institute of Physics
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 11
Issue 2
Article Number 023301
DOI https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5077038

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Copyright Statement
© 2019 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Bastankhah, Majid & Porté-Agel, Fernando (2019). Wind farm power optimization via yaw angle control: A wind tunnel study. Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy 11(2): 023301 and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5077038




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