Wind farm power gain maximization via combined yaw and pitch-based active wake control

The goal of a wind farm control strategy is twofold first, maximizing the wind farm's power production and, secondly, mitigating the associated mechanical loads acting on each wind turbine in the farm. Such loads are the result of each turbine's gravitational, inertial, and aerodynamical effects, and also due to the interaction with the wind flow of the neighboring upstream turbines, i.e. the due to the wake effects.

In order to maximize the power production and alleviating the loads at wind turbine level, several control schemes have been developed. However, this is not the case at wind farm level only two active wake control methods have been proposed based on axial induction factor (pitch-based) and wake steering (yaw-based).

In this work, a combined yaw-based and pitch-based active wake control strategy for power gain maximization with respect to the greedy configuration is proposed. The performance of the aforementioned strategy is evaluated in terms of power gain increase and it is implemented on a realistic wind farm layout using the steady state wind farm model FLORIS.