Effect of the Turbine Scale on Yaw Control

Yaw misalignment between the incoming wind and the rotor of a turbine causes a lateral displacement of the wake. This effect can be exploited to avoid or mitigate wake interactions in wind farms, so that power losses are minimized. We performed large-eddy simulations to evaluate yaw control for a three-turbine wind farm. We used two different turbine models to assess how the size of the turbine rotor affects the farm efficiency and the effectiveness of the control strategy. A utility-scale wind turbine with rotor diameter of 126 m is compared with a scaled research wind turbine with rotor diameter of 27 m. In both cases, a model-free algorithm is used to determine the turbine yaw set point, which maximizes total power production. The algorithm is the nested extremum-seeking control (NESC), which allows for the coordinated optimization of the wind turbine operating points. The results achieved with NESC are validated by computing a static performance map for different yaw angles. NESC converges to optimal operating conditions, which are in good agreement with the static map benchmark. Numerical results show that a larger rotor diameter induces larger wake deflection, thus achieving higher power improvements. From the analysis of the turbine structural loads, an increase in damage equivalent load is observed for both the yawed turbine and the waked one. Present results suggest that there is a cost-effective trade-off between performance and loads for large turbines. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.