Precision Computation of Wind Turbine Power Upgrades: An Aerodynamic and Control Optimization Test Case

2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi ◽  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Mario Luca Fravolini ◽  
Silvia Cascianelli ◽  
Ludovico Terzi
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Power Output ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Residual Life ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
Passive Flow Control ◽  
Production Improvement ◽  
Input Variables ◽  
And Control

Wind turbine upgrades have recently been spreading in the wind energy industry for optimizing the efficiency of the wind kinetic energy conversion. These interventions have material and labor costs; therefore, it is fundamental to estimate the production improvement realistically. Furthermore, the retrofitting of the wind turbines sited in complex environments might exacerbate the stress conditions to which those are subjected and consequently might affect the residual life. In this work, a two-step upgrade on a multimegawatt wind turbine is considered from a wind farm sited in complex terrain. First, vortex generators and passive flow control devices have been installed. Second, the management of the revolutions per minute has been optimized. In this work, a general method is formulated for assessing the wind turbine power upgrades using operational data. The method is based on the study of the residuals between the measured power output and a judicious model of the power output itself, before and after the upgrade. Therefore, properly selecting the model is fundamental. For this reason, an automatic feature selection algorithm is adopted, based on the stepwise multivariate regression. This allows identifying the most meaningful input variables for a multivariate linear model whose target is the power of the upgraded wind turbine. For the test case of interest, the adopted upgrade is estimated to increase the annual energy production to 2.6 ± 0.1%. The aerodynamic and control upgrades are estimated to be 1.8% and 0.8%, respectively, of the production improvement.

scholarly journals A Study of the Impact of Pitch Misalignment on Wind Turbine Performance

Machines ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Power Output ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Reactive Power ◽  
Power Production ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Input Variables ◽  
The Impact

Pitch angle control is the most common means of adjusting the torque of wind turbines. The verification of its correct function and the optimization of its control are therefore very important for improving the efficiency of wind kinetic energy conversion. On these grounds, this work is devoted to studying the impact of pitch misalignment on wind turbine power production. A test case wind farm sited onshore, featuring five multi-megawatt wind turbines, was studied. On one wind turbine on the farm, a maximum pitch imbalance between the blades of 4.5 ° was detected; therefore, there was an intervention for recalibration. Operational data were available for assessing production improvement after the intervention. Due to the non-stationary conditions to which wind turbines are subjected, this is generally a non-trivial problem. In this work, a general method was formulated for studying this kind of problem: it is based on the study, before and after the upgrade, of the residuals between the measured power output and a reliable model of the power output itself. A careful formulation of the model is therefore crucial: in this work, an automatic feature selection algorithm based on stepwise multivariate regression was adopted, and it allows identification of the most meaningful input variables for a multivariate linear model whose target is the power of the wind turbine whose pitch has been recalibrated. This method can be useful, in general, for the study of wind turbine power upgrades, which have been recently spreading in the wind energy industry, and for the monitoring of wind turbine performances. For the test case of interest, the power of the recalibrated wind turbine is modeled as a linear function of the active and reactive power of the nearby wind turbines, and it is estimated that, after the intervention, the pitch recalibration provided a 5.5% improvement in the power production below rated power. Wind turbine practitioners, in general, should pay considerable attention to the pitch imbalance, because it increases loads and affects the residue lifetime; in particular, the results of this study indicate that severe pitch misalignment can heavily impact power production.

scholarly journals Computing the Real Impact of Wind Turbine Power Curve Upgrades: A SCADA-Based Multivariate Linear Method and a Vortex Generator Test Case

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi ◽  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Mario Luca Fravolini ◽  
Silvia Cascianelli ◽  
Ludovico Terzi
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Linear Method ◽  
Vortex Generator ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
Linear Modeling ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The Real

Wind turbine upgrades have been spreading in the recent years in the wind energy industry, with the aim of optimizing the efficiency of wind kinetic energy conversion. This kind of interventions has material and labor costs and it is therefore fundamental to estimate realistically the production improvement. Further, the retrofitting of wind turbines sited in harsh environments might exacerbate the stressing conditions to which wind turbines are subjected and consequently might affect the residue lifetime. This work deals with a case of retrofitting: the testing ground is a multi-megawatt wind turbine from a wind farm sited in a very complex terrain. The blades have been optimized by installing vortex generators and passive flow control devices. The complexity of this test case, dictated by the environment and by the features of the data set at disposal, inspires the formulation of a general method for estimating production upgrades, based on multivariate linear modeling of the power output of the upgraded wind turbine. The method is a distinctive part of the outcome of this work because it is generalizable to the study of whatever wind turbine upgrade and it is adaptable to the features of the data sets at disposal. In particular, applying this model to the test case of interest, it arises that the upgrade increases the annual energy production of the wind turbine of an amount of the order of the 2%. This quantity is of the same order of magnitude, albeit non-negligibly lower, than the estimate based on the assumption of ideal wind conditions. Therefore, it arises that complex wind conditions might affect the efficiency of wind turbine upgrades and it is therefore important to estimate their impact using data from wind turbines operating in the real environment of interest.

scholarly journals Correlations of power output fluctuations in an offshore wind farm using high-resolution SCADA data

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1014
Author(s):  
Janna Kristina Seifert ◽  
Martin Kraft ◽  
Martin Kühn ◽  
Laura J. Lukassen
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Power Output ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Offshore Wind ◽  
Offshore Wind Farm ◽  
Flow Conditions ◽  
Output Fluctuations ◽  
Power Difference ◽  
Time Correlations

Abstract. Space–time correlations of power output fluctuations of wind turbine pairs provide information on the flow conditions within a wind farm and the interactions of wind turbines. Such information can play an essential role in controlling wind turbines and short-term load or power forecasting. However, the challenges of analysing correlations of power output fluctuations in a wind farm are the highly varying flow conditions. Here, we present an approach to investigate space–time correlations of power output fluctuations of streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs based on high-resolution supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. The proposed approach overcomes the challenge of spatially variable and temporally variable flow conditions within the wind farm. We analyse the influences of the different statistics of the power output of wind turbines on the correlations of power output fluctuations based on 8 months of measurements from an offshore wind farm with 80 wind turbines. First, we assess the effect of the wind direction on the correlations of power output fluctuations of wind turbine pairs. We show that the correlations are highest for the streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs and decrease when the mean wind direction changes its angle to be more perpendicular to the pair. Further, we show that the correlations for streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs depend on the location of the wind turbines within the wind farm and on their inflow conditions (free stream or wake). Our primary result is that the standard deviations of the power output fluctuations and the normalised power difference of the wind turbines in a pair can characterise the correlations of power output fluctuations of streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs. Further, we show that clustering can be used to identify different correlation curves. For this, we employ the data-driven k-means clustering algorithm to cluster the standard deviations of the power output fluctuations of the wind turbines and the normalised power difference of the wind turbines in a pair. Thereby, wind turbine pairs with similar power output fluctuation correlations are clustered independently from their location. With this, we account for the highly variable flow conditions inside a wind farm, which unpredictably influence the correlations.

scholarly journals Wake behavior and control: comparison of LES simulations and wind tunnel measurements

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiangang Wang ◽  
Chengyu Wang ◽  
Filippo Campagnolo ◽  
Carlo L. Bottasso
Keyword(s):  
Wind Tunnel ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Operating Conditions ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Near Wake ◽  
Large Eddy ◽  
Control Comparison ◽  
High Turbulence ◽  
And Control

Abstract. This paper applies a large-eddy actuator line approach to the simulation of wind turbine wakes. In addition to normal operating conditions, a specific focus of the paper is on wake manipulation, which is performed here by derating, yaw misalignment and cyclic pitching of the blades. With the purpose of clarifying the ability of LES methods to represent conditions that are relevant for wind farm control, numerical simulations are compared to experimental observations obtained in a boundary layer wind tunnel with scaled wind turbine models. Results indicate a good overall matching of simulations with experiments. Low-turbulence test cases appear to be more challenging than moderate- and high-turbulence ones due to the need for denser grids to limit numerical diffusion and accurately resolve tip-shed vortices in the near-wake region.

scholarly journals Power Generation and Voltage Regulation of 132KV Karbala Grid using DFIG Wind Turbine Generator

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Qasim Kamil Mohsin ◽  
Xiangning Lin ◽  
Owolabi Sunday ◽  
Asad Waqar
Keyword(s):  
Transmission Line ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Reactive Power ◽  
Electrical Energy ◽  
Clean Energy ◽  
Voltage Regulation ◽  
Turbine Generators ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
And Control

Due to increasing demand on electrical energy in Iraq and to have clean energy that is environmental friendly, wind energy would be one of the most important and promising sources of renewable energy to achieve this goal. This paper discussed the reasons to use the Doubly-Feed Induction Generator (DFIG) amongst the available types of wind turbine generators, and in section (4) illustrate Motivations to select place to the wind farm construction. using decupling method (the vector control strategy) to change reactive power of DFIG 2MW connected to middle of the 132KV transmission line (Karbala north – Alahkader) without effect about the active power generated from DFIG itself with fixed wind speed value assumed to provide the voltage regulation, and control of the transmission line In addition to power generating. By using PSCAD/EMTDC, different simulation results are presented based on various scenarios.

scholarly journals Integrated wind farm layout and control optimization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mads M. Pedersen ◽  
Gunner C. Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Wind Speed ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Design Space ◽  
Wind Farm Layout ◽  
Control Optimization ◽  
Mean Wind Speed ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract. Design of an optimal wind farm topology and wind farm control scheduling depends on the chosen metric. The objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of optimal wind farm control on the optimal wind farm layout in terms of power production. A successful fulfilment of this goal requires: 1) an accurate and fast flow model; 2) selection of the minimum set of design parameters that rules the problem; and 3) selection of an optimization algorithm with good scaling properties. For control of the individual wind farm turbines, the two most obvious strategies are wake steering based on active wind turbine yaw control and wind turbine derating. The present investigation is a priori limited to wind turbine derating. A high-speed linearized CFD RANS solver models the flow field and the crucial wind turbine wake interactions inside the wind farm. The actuator disk method is used to model the wind turbines, and utilizing an aerodynamic model, the design space of the optimization problem is reduced to only three variables per turbine – two geometric and one carefully selected variable specifying the individual wind turbine derating setting for each mean wind speed and direction. The full design space spanned by these (2N + Nd Ns N) parameters, where N is the number of wind farm turbines, Nd is the number of direction bins, and Ns is the number of mean wind speed bins. This design space is decomposed in two subsets, which in turn define a nested set of optimization problems to achieve the fastest possible optimization procedure. Following a simplistic sanity check of the platform functionality regarding wind farm layout and control optimization, the capabilities of the developed optimization platform is demonstrated on the Swedish offshore wind farm. For this particular wind farm, the analysis demonstrates that the expected annual energy production can be increased by 4 % by integrating the wind farm control in the design of the wind farm layout, which is 1.2 % higher than what is achieved by optimizing the layout only.

scholarly journals Integrated wind farm layout and control optimization

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 1551-1566
Author(s):  
Mads M. Pedersen ◽  
Gunner C. Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Design Space ◽  
Wind Farm Layout ◽  
Control Optimization ◽  
Mean Wind Speed ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Full Design ◽  
And Control ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract. The objective of this paper is to investigate the joint optimization of wind farm layout and wind farm control in terms of power production. A successful fulfilment of this goal requires the following: (1) an accurate and fast flow model, (2) selection of the minimum set of design parameters that rules or governs the problem, and (3) selection of an optimization algorithm with good scaling properties. For control of the individual wind farm turbines with the aim of wind farm production optimization, the two most obvious strategies are wake steering based on active wind turbine yaw control and wind turbine derating. The present investigation is limited to wind turbine derating. A high-speed linearized computational fluid dynamics (CFD) Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) solver models the flow field and the crucial wind turbine wake interactions inside the wind farm. The actuator disc method is used to model the wind turbines, and utilizing an aerodynamic model, the design space of the optimization problem is reduced to only three variables per turbine – two geometric and one carefully selected variable specifying the individual wind turbine derating setting for each mean wind speed and direction. The full design space is spanned by these (2N+NdNsN) parameters, where N is the number of wind farm turbines, Nd is the number of direction bins, and Ns is the number of mean wind speed bins. This design space is decomposed into two subsets, which in turn define a nested set of optimization problems to achieve a significantly faster optimization procedure compared to a direct optimization based on the full design space. Following a simplistic sanity check of the platform functionality regarding wind farm layout and control optimization, the capability of the developed optimization platform is demonstrated on a Swedish offshore wind farm. For this particular wind farm, the analysis demonstrates that the expected annual energy production can be increased by 4 % by integrating the wind farm control into the design of the wind farm layout, which is 1.2 % higher than what is achieved by optimizing the layout only.

scholarly journals Optimal Irregular Wind Farm Design for Continuous Placement of Wind Turbines with a Two-Dimensional Jensen-Gaussian Wake Model

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 2660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Longyan Wang ◽  
Yunkai Zhou ◽  
Jian Xu
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Power Output ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Power Losses ◽  
Wake Effect ◽  
Coordinate Method ◽  
Wind Farm Design ◽  
Wake Model ◽  
Farm Design

Optimal design of wind turbine placement in a wind farm is one of the most effective tools to reduce wake power losses by alleviating the wake effect in the wind farm. In comparison to the discrete grid-based wind farm design method, the continuous coordinate method has the property of continuously varying the placement of wind turbines, and hence, is far more capable of obtaining the global optimum solutions. In this paper, the coordinate method was applied to optimize the layout of a real offshore wind farm for both simplified and realistic wind conditions. A new analytical wake model (Jensen-Gaussian model) taking into account the wake velocity variation in the radial direction was employed for the optimization study. The means of handling the irregular real wind farm boundary were proposed to guarantee that the optimized wind turbine positions are feasible within the wind farm boundary, and the discretization method was applied for the evaluation of wind farm power output under Weibull distribution. By investigating the wind farm layout optimization under different wind conditions, it showed that the total wind farm power output increased linearly with an increasing number of wind turbines. Under some particular wind conditions (e.g., constant wind speed and wind direction, and Weibull distribution), almost the same power losses were obtained under the wake effect of some adjacent wind turbine numbers. A common feature of the wind turbine placements regardless of the wind conditions was that they were distributed along the wind farm boundary as much as possible in order to alleviate the wake effect.

scholarly journals Five Megawatt Wind Turbine Power Output Improvements by Passive Flow Control Devices

Energies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Unai Fernandez-Gamiz ◽  
Ekaitz Zulueta ◽  
Ana Boyano ◽  
Igor Ansoategui ◽  
Irantzu Uriarte
Keyword(s):  
Flow Control ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Power Output ◽  
Passive Flow Control ◽  
Passive Flow ◽  
Flow Control Devices ◽  
Control Devices

scholarly journals A Study of Blockage Effects at the Wind Turbine and Wind Farm Scales

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (19) ◽  
pp. 6124
Author(s):  
Mihaela Popescu ◽  
Tore Flåtten
Keyword(s):  
Energy Balance ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Power Output ◽  
Wind Farm ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Combined Effect ◽  
The Other ◽  
Energy Yield ◽  
Farm Scale ◽  
First Time

The paper provides novel insights into the physics behind the wind turbine and wind farm blockages as well as their effects on the energy yield based on the momentum and energy balance. The current work presents blockage effects at two scales: the local scale and the wind farm scale. We clarify the combined effect of local blockages when more than one turbine is present. The work demonstrates why two turbines, which are positioned one behind the other, induce a mutual decrease in energy yield. When the turbines are placed in a row, there is an increase of energy from the end to the middle of the row because of the restriction of the expansion flow. As in the case of two turbines placed behind each other, back rows induce a power decrease for the rows in front of them and the effect increases from the edge to the center. The work also elucidates for the first time how the power output of an isolated row has a maximum in the center, whereas, in a wind farm, wind turbines on the edge of the first row could have maximum power. The findings are supported by CFD.

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