BladedFarmWake: A framework for evaluating the influence of upstream wakes on turbine loads using Bladed

Abstract

A new framework “BladedFarmWake” to include the upstream wake effects into a wind turbine design tool Bladed was developed in the present work. The effects of neighboring turbines in a wind farm are extracted from a wind farm flow solver LongSim, which has been developed for designing wind farm controllers and evaluating wind farm performance, taking account of atmospheric conditions and wake effects including the importance of turbine layouts and individual turbine or wind farm control strategies. These wind farm effects are incorporated into Bladed simulations to obtain time accurate load analyses. BladedFarmWake is designed to work with less human interaction as much as possible, allowing the tool to be adopted in large scale load analyses within the wind turbine design load cases (DLCs). It is demonstrated that the timeseries of the wind flow field and the wake meandering effects are successfully modelled in the framework. The effects of velocity deficit and the wake added turbulence are well captured in the generated turbulent data. As a consequence of the velocity deficit from the upstream turbine, the hub load changes considerably due to the wake meandering effects. The newly developed integrated framework will be of value for wind turbine engineers to incorporate wind farm effects in the design process.