Turbulence and Control of Wind Farms

Abstract

The dynamics of the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer play a fundamental role in wind farm energy production, governing the velocity field that enters the farm as well as the turbulent mixing that regenerates energy for extraction at downstream rows. Understanding the dynamic interactions among turbines, wind farms, and the atmospheric boundary layer can therefore be beneficial in improving the efficiency of wind farm control approaches. Anticipated increases in the sizes of new wind farms to meet renewable energy targets will increase the importance of exploiting this understanding to advance wind farm control capabilities. This review discusses approaches for modeling and estimation of the wind farm flow field that have exploited such knowledge in closed-loop control, to varying degrees. We focus on power tracking as an example application that will be of critical importance as wind farms transition into their anticipated role as major suppliers of electricity. The discussion highlights the benefits of including the dynamics of the flow field in control and points to critical shortcomings of the current approaches. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, Volume 5 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Collective intelligence as a public good

“…Collective intelligence can significantly enhance the performance of technological systems comprised of many individual units, from power grids (Liu et al, 2022), wind-turbine farms (Shapiro et al, 2022), and industrial process control (Christofides et al, 2013), to air traffic control (Gopalakrishnan and Balakrishnan, 2021) and teams of autonomous robotic vehicles (Bullo et al, 2009; Parker et al, 2016). Teams of robots have enormous potential to address challenging problems in complex environments.…”

Resolvent-based motion-to-wake modelling of wind turbine wakes under dynamic rotor motion

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Optimal Controller Design for Wind Turbine using Sliding Sector and Genetic Algorithms

“…The field of Energy Engineering has taken much interest in recent decades. This area motivates researchers to find new sources of clean, sustainable, and renewable energy [1,2]. In addition, this field motivates engineers to develop new strategies for these installations.…”