Engineering models for merging wakes in wind farm optimization applications

The present paper deals with validation of 4 different engineering wake superposition approaches against detailed CFD simulations and covering different turbine interspacing, ambient turbulence intensities and mean wind speeds. The first engineering model is a simple linear superposition of wake deficits as applied in e.g. Fuga. The second approach is the square root of sums of squares approach, which is applied in the widely used PARK program. The third approach, which is presently used with the Dynamic Wake Meandering (DWM) model, assumes that the wake affected downstream flow field to be determined by a superposition of the ambient flow field and the dominating wake among contributions from all upstream turbines at any spatial position and at any time. The last approach developed by G.C. Larsen is a newly developed model based on a parabolic type of approach, which combines wake deficits successively. The study indicates that wake interaction depends strongly on the relative wake deficit magnitude, i.e. the deficit magnitude normalized with respect to the ambient mean wind speed, and that the dominant wake assumption within the DWM framework is the most accurate.