The wind energy industry relies heavily on CFD to analyze new designs. This paper investigates a way to utilize CFD further upstream the design process where lower-fidelity methods are used. We present the first comprehensive 3-D CFD adjoint-based shape optimization of a 10 MW modern offshore wind turbine. The present work shows that, with the right tools, we can model the entire geometry, including the root, and optimize modern wind turbine rotors at the cost of a few hundred CFD evaluations.

A common assumption in the design of wind turbines and wind farms is that the wind field is quite uniform. This assumption is violated during so-called low-level jet events, when there is a distinct peak in the wind speed. Low-level jets modify loads on the turbines and also affect power production. To understand their impact and facilitate better planning and design, we present a detailed climatology of these events over the North Sea, based on offshore measurements and meteorological models.

We propose the use of a new method to efficiently compute the annual energy production (AEP) of a wind farm by properly handling the uncertainties in the wind direction and wind speed. We apply the new ideas to the layout optimization of a large wind farm. We show significant computational savings by reducing the number of simulations required to accurately compute and optimize the AEP of different wind farms.

In this paper the results of the stability analysis of a free-yawing downwind turbine are shown and the turbine's ability to align the rotor passively with the wind direction is investigated. The results show that a tilt angle causes the equilibrium yaw position of free-yawing downwind to be non-zero. It is shown that an increase in cone angle can stabilize the free-yaw mode significantly, while blade flapwise flexibility will increase the risk of an instability of the free-yaw mode.

Over the past few decades, single-rotor wind turbines have increased in size with the blades being extended toward lengths of 100 m. An alternative upscaling of turbines can be achieved by using multi-rotor wind turbines. In this article, measurements and numerical simulations of a utility-scale four-rotor wind turbine show that rotor interaction leads to increased energy production and faster wake recovery; these findings may allow for the design of wind farms with improved energy production.

Wake steering is a form of wind farm control in which turbines use yaw offsets to affect wakes in order to yield an increase in total energy production. In this first phase of a study of wake steering at a commercial wind farm, two turbines implement a schedule of offsets. For two closely spaced turbines, an approximate 14 % increase in energy was measured on the downstream turbine over a 10° sector, with a 4 % increase in energy production of the combined turbine pair.

Wind turbine wake recovery is very sensitive to ambient atmospheric conditions. This paper presents a way of including a local turbulence intensity estimation from SCADA into the Jensen wake model to improve its accuracy. This new model procedure is used to optimize power production of an operating wind farm and shows that some gains can be expected even if uncertainties remain high. These optimized settings are to be implemented in a field test campaign in the scope of the SMARTEOLE project.

In this paper, detailed inflow information extracted from measurements is used to improve the accuracy of simulated wind turbine fatigue loads. Inflow information from nearby met masts is utilised as well as information from a blade-mounted flow sensor in combination with a method to compensate for the disturbance to the flow caused by the presence of the wind turbine.

We investigate large wind speed fluctuations from a 10-year period at the Danish coastal site Høvsøre. The most extreme fluctuations are not turbulent but due to larger-scale weather phenomena. We find how these fluctuations impact wind turbines using simulations. The results are then compared to an extreme turbulence model described in the wind turbine safety standards, and it is found that the loads on the different turbine components are not the same as what the standard describes.

Often in wind power forecasting the mean wind speed is forecasted at a plant, converted to power, and multiplied by the number of turbines to predict the plant's generating capacity. This methodology ignores the variability among turbines caused by localized weather, terrain, and array orientation. We show that the wind farm mean wind speed approach for power conversion is impacted by Jensen's inequality, quantify the differences, and show machine learning can overcome these differences.

Typically, turbines do not share information with nearby turbines in a wind farm. Relying on a single turbine sensor on the back of a turbine nacelle can lead to large errors in yaw misalignment or excessive yawing due to noisy sensor measurements. The wind farm consensus control approach in this paper shows the benefits of sharing information between nearby turbines by computing a robust estimate of the wind direction using noisy sensor information from these neighboring turbines.

The actuator line was intended as a lifting line technique for CFD applications. In this paper we prove – theoretically and practically – that smearing the forces of the actuator line in the flow domain leads to smeared velocity fields. By combining a near-wake representation of the trailed vorticity with a viscous vortex core model, the missing induction from the smeared velocity is recovered and a lifting line for CFD simulations established.