Wake Mixing Control For Floating Wind Farms: Analysis of the Implementation of the Helix Wake Mixing Strategy on the IEA 15-MW Floating Wind Turbine

Achieving the European Union’s target of 510 GW of installed wind energy capacity by 2030 requires a significant expansion of the currently installed capacity of 255 GW <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref>, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[2]</xref>. As a consequence of these ambitions, the power density of newly developed wind farms is rising by increasing the number of turbines within a wind farm and the size of individual turbines <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[3]</xref>. The larger wind farms are predominantly located offshore where wind conditions are more consistent and, on average, wind speeds are higher compared to onshore locations <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[4]</xref>. Furthermore, more than 80% of Europe’s wind energy resources can be found in waters too deep for bottom-fixed turbines <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[5]</xref>, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[6]</xref>, resulting in a sharp increase in the interest in floating wind turbines over the past decade (see “Summary”).