A dynamic open-source model to investigate wake dynamics in response to wind farm flow control strategies
Abstract. Wind Farm Flow Control (WFFC) is the discipline of manipulating the flow between wind turbines to achieve a farm-wide goal, like power tracking, load mitigation, or power maximization. Specifically, steady-state control approaches have shown promising results in both theory and practice for power maximization. But how are they expected to perform in a dynamically changing environment? This paper presents an open-source wake modeling framework called OFF. It allows the approximation of the performance of WFFC strategies in response to environmental changes at a low computational cost. It is rooted in previously published dynamic parametric engineering models and offers a flexible and adaptable platform to explore these models further. The presented study tests the modeling framework by investigating the performance of different wake steering controllers in a 10-turbine wind farm case study based on a subset of the Dutch wind farm Hollandse Kust Noord (HKN). The case study uses a 24-hour wind direction time series based on field data and verifies subsets of the time series in LES. The results highlight how dependent yaw travel is on the controller settings and suggest where users can strike a balance between power gains and actuator usage. They also show the structural differences and similarities between steady-state and dynamic engineering models. The comparison to LES shows what time scales the surrogate models cover and how accurately. While steady-state models capture turbine power signal dynamics up to ≈ 1/570 Hz, the dynamic wake description can predict dynamics up to ≈ 1/360 Hz with a better correlation and normalized root-mean-square-error. Further results show that the dynamic wake description is mainly advantageous over steady-state wake models for shorter periods (< 20 min). The paper also opens up the discussion about the effectiveness of wind farm flow control in a time-marching manner as opposed to a steady-state viewpoint.