On wind farm wake mixing strategies using dynamic individual pitch control

Abstract

Dynamic wind farm control is a new strategy that aims to apply time-varying, often periodic, control signals on upstream wind turbines to increase the wake mixing behind the turbine. As a result, wake recovery is accelerated, leading to a higher power production of downstream turbines. As the amount of interest in dynamic control strategies for wind turbines in a wind farm is increasing, different approaches are being proposed. One such novel approach is called Dynamic Individual Pitch Control (DIPC). In DIPC, each blade pitch angle of a turbine is controlled independently to dynamically manipulate the direction of the thrust force vector exerted on the wind. Hence, the direction of the wake is varied, inducing wake mixing without significant thrust force magnitude variations on the rotor. In this paper, the effectiveness of different variations in the thrust direction are evaluated and compared using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) experiments.