Yaw-misalignment and its impact on wind turbine loads and wind farm power output

Abstract

To make wind energy cost competitive with traditional resources, wind turbines are commonly placed in groups. Aerodynamic interaction between the turbines causes sub-optimal energy production. A control strategy to mitigate these losses is by redirecting the wake by yaw misalignment. This paper aims to assess the influence of load variations of the rotor due to partial wake overlap and presents a combined optimization of the power and loads using wake redirection. For this purpose, we design a computational framework which computes the wind farm power production and the wind turbine rotor loads based on the yaw settings. The simulation results show that partial wake overlap can significantly increase asymmetric loading of the rotor disk and that yaw misalignment is beneficial in situations where the wake can be sufficiently directed away from the downstream turbine.