Effectiveness of wake control optimization for multiple in-line wind turbines by combinatorial machine learning wake model

Abstract

In the wind turbine wake control research, the analytical wake model does not consider the influence of direct control parameters on the wind turbine wake flow field, and its prediction accuracy is by no means satisfying. The numerical simulation method can accurately predict the wake effect, but its low computational efficiency renders it unable to be used in the iterative control optimization study. In this paper, a new wake model coupled with the direct control parameters (tip speed ratio and pitch angle) of a single wind turbine is built based on the machine learning algorithm for which the widely applied Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is applied for instance. By combining the ANN wake model with different wake superposition models, the best combinatorial model for quantitative evaluation of multiple wake interferences is achieved, which not only has great accuracy but also ensures high calculation efficiency. On top of the established combinatorial wake model, three in-line wind turbines are investigated for assessing the effectiveness of wake control optimization with respect to the traditional greedy control. The results show that by optimizing the control parameters (tip speed ratio and pitch angle) of wind turbines, the total power of the three wind turbine units is increased by 1.15~3.48% depending on the incoming wind speeds and distances apart between wind turbines. The power variation of each wind turbine shows that the increase in total power is achieved by the decreased power of the first wind turbine and the increased power of the second and third wind turbines. The research verifies the effectiveness of adopting optimized wind turbine wake control on the total wind farm power improvement numerically.