T2FL: An efficient model for wind turbine fatigue damage prediction for the two-turbine case

Abstract

Wind farm load assessment is typically conducted using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or aeroelastic simulations, which need a lot of computer power. A number of applications, for example wind farm layout optimisation, turbine lifetime estimation and wind farm control, requires a simplified but sufficiently detailed model for computing the turbine fatigue load. In addition, the effect of turbine curtailment is particularly important in the calculation of the turbine loads. Therefore, this paper develops a fast and computationally efficient method for wind turbine load assessment in a wind farm, including the wake effects. In particular, the turbine fatigue loads are computed using a surrogate model that is based on the turbine operating condition, for example, power set-point and turbine location, and the ambient wind inflow information. The Turbine to Farm Loads (T2FL) surrogate model is constructed based on a set of high fidelity aeroelastic simulations, including the Dynamic Wake Meandering model and an artificial neural network that uses the Bayesian Regularisation (BR) and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithms. An ensemble model is used that outperforms model predictions of the BR and LM algorithms independently. Furthermore, a case study of a two turbine wind farm is demonstrated, where the turbine power set-point and fatigue loads can be optimised based on the proposed surrogate model. The results show that the downstream turbine producing more power than the upstream turbine is favourable for minimising the load. In addition, simulation results further demonstrate that the accumulated fatigue damage of turbines can be effectively distributed amongst the turbines in a wind farm using the power curtailment and the proposed surrogate model.