Evaluating wake models for wind farm control

Wind turbines are typically operated to maximize their own performance without considering the impact of wake effects on nearby turbines. There is the potential to increase total power and reduce structural loads by properly coordinating the individual turbines in a wind farm. The effective design and analysis of such coordinated controllers requires turbine wake models of sufficient accuracy but low computational complexity. This paper first formulates a coordinated control problem for a two-turbine array. Next, the paper reviews several existing simulation tools that range from low-fidelity, quasi-static models to high-fidelity, computational fluid dynamic models. These tools are compared by evaluating the power, loads, and flow characteristics for the coordinated two-turbine array. The results in this paper highlight the advantages and disadvantages of existing wake models for design and analysis of coordinated wind farm controllers.