Replacing wakes with streaks in wind turbine arrays

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through large-eddy simulations that tilting wind turbine rotors in arrays can create high-speed streaks, reducing wake effects and increasing overall wind farm power output.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of using rotor tilt in turbine arrays to generate streaks, enhancing power extraction and wake mitigation, a novel approach compared to traditional wake control methods.

Findings

Tilted rotors produce high-speed streaks replacing wakes.

Power output increases with rotor tilt and higher induction rates.

Optimal ratios of rotor size and spacing enhance power gains.

Abstract

Wind turbine wakes negatively impact downwind turbines in wind farms reducing their global efficiency. The reduction of wake-turbine interactions by actuating control on yaw angles and induction factors is an active area of research. In this study, the capability of spanwise-periodic wind turbine arrays with tilted rotors to reduce negative turbine-wakes interaction is investigated by means of large-eddy simulations. It is shown that by means of rotor tilt it is possible to replace turbine far wakes with high-speed streaks where the streamwise velocity exceeds the freestream velocity at hub height. Considering three aligned arrays of wind turbines, it is found that the global power extracted from the wind can be increased by tilting rotors of upwind turbine arrays similarly to what already known for the case of a single row of aligned turbines. It is further shown that global tilt-induced power gains can be significantly increased by operating the tilted turbines at higher induction rates. Power gains can be further increased by increasing the ratio of the rotor diameters and turbine spacing to the boundary layer thickness. All these findings are consistent with those of previous studies where streamwise streaks were artificially forced by means of arrays of wall-mounted roughness elements in order to control canonical boundary layers for drag-reduction purposes.