Dynamic wind farm flow control using free-vortex wake models

A novel dynamic economic model-predictive control strategy is presented that improves wind farm power production and reduces the additional demands of wake steering on yaw actuation when compared to an industry state-of-the-art reference controller. The novel controller takes a distributed approach to yaw control optimisation using a free-vortex wake model. An actuator-disc representation of the wind turbine is employed and adapted to the wind farm scale by modelling secondary effects of wake steering and connecting individual turbines through a directed graph network. The economic model-predictive control problem is solved on a receding horizon using gradient-based optimisation, demonstrating sufficient performance for realising real-time control. The novel controller is tested in a large-eddy simulation environment and compared against a state-of-the-art look-up table approach based on steady-state model optimisation and an extension with wind direction preview. Under realistic variations in wind direction and wind speed, the preview-enabled look-up table controller yielded the largest gains in power production. The novel controller based on the free-vortex wake produced smaller gains in these conditions while yielding more power under large changes in wind direction. Additionally, the novel controller demonstrated potential for a substantial reduction in yaw actuator usage.