Challenges in wind farm optimization

To achieve the optimal economic output from a wind farm over its lifetime, an optimal balance between capital costs, operation and maintenance costs, fatigue lifetime consumption of turbine components and power production is to be determined on a rational basis. This has implications both for the wind turbine modeling, where aeroelastic models are required, and for the wind farm flow field description, where in-stationary flow field modeling is needed to capture the complicated mixture of atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) flows and upstream emitted meandering wind turbine wakes, which together dictates the fatigue loading of the individual wind turbines.
Within an optimization context, the basic challenge in describing the in-stationary wind farm flow field is computational speed. The Dynamic Wake Meandering (DWM) model includes the basic features of a CFD Large Eddy Simulation approach in an engineering manner by essentially treating wind turbine wakes as passive tracers emitted into an ABL field. Interfacing the DWM model with the aeroelastic code HAWC2 has facilitated development of the wind farm optimization platform TOPFARM. Features of the TOPFARM platform will be described, including full-scale validation examples of key elements as well as example applications, and recent developments and future plans will be touch on.