Precisely tracking wake center position for wind farm control
DOI: 10.1063/10.0003581
Precisely tracking wake center position for wind farm control lead image
For better energy yield and load reduction of turbines, modern wind farms use a feedback mechanism to optimize their control strategies. Wake position is an important measurement for improving the performance and robustness of closed loop control strategies.
Dong et al. present an approach to precisely track the wake center position. Their approach, which combines a Kalman filter and dynamic wake meandering model, estimates the position of the wake center based on turbine rotor loads, a measurement from the standard turbine sensor.
The authors used simulations to investigate how different turbulence intensities would affect the wake tracking performance of their approach. They found in low ambient turbulence intensity, their approach precisely tracks the lateral and vertical positions of the wake center. In high turbulence intensity, however, they had to apply relatively longer time-averaging in order to highlight the overall wake trends instead of the short-term fluctuations.
Wake position information obtained with this method could help prevent excessively high turbine loads by acting as a fault detection alarm.
“The work is also suitable for fault detection to detect misbehaviors in the control system,”
said author Liang Dong. “If there is a significant difference between estimated wake position and intended redirected wake position, then the situation requires extreme caution, in case wake redirection control leads to unexpected wake dynamic, and the alarm should be triggered to avoid increasing the turbine loads excessively.”
In order to make their approach suitable for wake redirection, the authors plan to incorporate and test more advanced wake models that describe different wake interaction scenarios.
Source: “Wake position tracking using dynamic wake meandering model and rotor loads,” by Liang Dong, Wai Hou Lio, and Fanzhong Meng, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (2021). The article can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0032917 .
