Drafting a picture of wind farms during very hot daytime conditions
Drafting a picture of wind farms during very hot daytime conditions lead image
In wind farms, where multiple turbines are present, turbines that are directly exposed to the wind perform better than those behind other turbines, which impacts how the wind farm performs. Fully understanding this wake phenomenon under different conditions can help wind farm operators and designers maximize their farms’ power production.
Cheung et al. investigated wind farm and wind turbine wakes in very hot daytime conditions.
“Our research focused on very hot daytime conditions when the atmosphere is very turbulent, and when the heating of the air causes updrafts and downdrafts to occur,” author Lawrence Cheung said. “Previous studies have not included these conditions in their models of wind farm flows, or they assumed they cancel out when averaged over the entire wind farm.”
The team found that the behavior of a wind turbine and its resulting wake changes based on its location relative to local wind conditions. When located in updraft regions of the atmospheric flow, turbines tended to see lower velocity wind and produce less power, and their wakes were weaker and included higher turbulence. The opposite was true for wind turbines located in downdrafts.
The team analyzed meteorological and radar measurements taken at a wind farm to identify characteristics typical of winds during hot daytimes. They then ran detailed, high-fidelity numerical simulations to determine how the wind turbines and their wakes interacted with the atmosphere. Finally, they constructed simpler mathematical models that predicted how these wakes would behave under hot daytime conditions, with similar results as the more resource-intensive simulations.
Potential future work includes studying other atmospheric conditions and terrain effects.
Source: “Modification of wind turbine wakes by large-scale, convective atmospheric boundary layer structures,” by Lawrence Cheung, Gopal Yalla, Kenneth Brown, Nathaniel deVelder, Alan Hsieh, Thomas Herges, Daniel Houck, David Maniaci, Philip Sakievich, and Aliza Abraham, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (2024). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0211722 .
This paper is part of the Preparatory Work for the American Wake Experiment (AWAKEN) Collection, learn more here .
