Closed-Loop Model-Predictive Wind Farm Flow Control Under Time-Varying Inflow Using FLORIDyn

Abstract

Wind farm flow control has been a key research focus in recent years, driven by the idea that a collectively operating wind farm can outperform individually controlled turbines. Control strategies are predominantly applied in an open-loop manner, where the current flow conditions are used to look up precomputed steady-state set points. Closed-loop control approaches, on the other hand, take measurements from the farm into account and optimize their set points online, which makes them more flexible and resilient. This paper introduces a closed-loop model-predictive wind farm controller using the dynamic engineering model FLORIDyn to maximize the energy generated by a ten-turbine wind farm. The framework consists of an Ensemble Kalman Filter to continuously correct the flow field estimate, as well as a novel optimization strategy. To this end, the paper discusses two dynamic ways to maximize the farm energy and compares this to the current look-up table industry standard. The framework relies solely on turbine measurements without using a flow field preview. In a 3-h case study with time-varying conditions, the derived controllers achieve an overall energy gain of 3% to 4.4% with noise-free wind direction measurements. If disturbed and biased measurements are used, this performance decreases to 1.9% to 3% over the greedy control baseline with the same measurements. The comparison to look-up table controllers shows that the closed-loop framework performance is more robust to disturbed measurements but can only match the performance in noise-free conditions.