Wind Turbine Wake Regulation Method Coupling Actuator Model and Engineering Wake Model

The wake effect is one of the main factors affecting the power generation of wind farms. Wake regulation is often used to reduce the wake interference between wind turbines. Accurate assessment of the wake flow of wind turbine is essential to wake regulation. Engineering wake models are widely used for rapid evaluation of the wake at present due to lower computational resource cost. However, the selection of empirical parameters of the wake model has significant influence on the prediction accuracy, especially in the case of yaw. The actuator model based on CFD simulation has less dependence on empirical parameters and higher simulation accuracy. However, the computational cost is too high for wake regulation for large wind farms. This paper proposed an improved wake regulation method that combines the advantages of the actuator line model (ALM) method and the engineering wake mode. The simulation results of the ALM is used to calibrate the empirical parameters of the engineering wake model. The calibrated wake model can be used to optimize the yaw angle of wind turbines during wake regulation. The accuracy of two models is compared using wind tunnel experimental data. The ALM results give better agreement to the experimental data. The Horns Rev wind farm case is used for the coupled method verification. The power generation increase using the engineering wake model is obviously greater than that of the ALM. After calibrating the wake model, the gap between the two power predictions is greatly narrowed, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed coupling method can be used to improve the credibility of the wake regulation with affordable computational cost.