A physics-guided machine learning framework for real-time dynamic wake prediction of wind turbines

Abstract

Efficient and accurate prediction of the wind turbine dynamic wake is crucial for active wake control and load assessment in wind farms. This paper proposes a real-time dynamic wake prediction model for wind turbines based on a physics-guided neural network. The model can predict the instantaneous dynamic wake field under various operating conditions using only the inflow wind speed as input. The model utilizes Taylor’s frozen-flow hypothesis and a steady-state wake model to convert instantaneous inflow wind speed and turbine parameters into neural network input features. A deep convolutional neural network then maps these features to desired wake field snapshots, enabling dynamic wake predictions for wind turbines. To train the model, we generated approximately 255 000 instantaneous flow field snapshots of single-turbine wakes using the large eddy simulation, covering different thrust coefficients and yaw angles. The model was trained using the supervised learning method and verified on the test set. The results indicate that the model can effectively predict the dynamic wake characteristics, including the dynamic wake meandering and the wake deflection of the yawed turbines. The model can also assess both the instantaneous wake velocity and the instantaneous wake center of a wind turbine. At a thrust coefficient of 0.75, the root mean square error for the predicted instantaneous wake velocity is around 6.53%, while the Pearson correlation coefficient for the predicted instantaneous wake center can reach 0.624. Furthermore, once the model is trained, its prediction accuracy does not decrease with the increase in the time span.