Coupled wind turbine design and layout optimization with nonhomogeneous wind turbines

Stanley, Andrew P. J.; Ning, Andrew

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-4-99-2019

Articles | Volume 4, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-4-99-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-4-99-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 4, issue 1

Research article

|

30 Jan 2019

Research article |

| 30 Jan 2019

Coupled wind turbine design and layout optimization with nonhomogeneous wind turbines

Andrew P. J. Stanley and Andrew Ning

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Final revised paper (published on 30 Jan 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 13 Jul 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Report 1', Anonymous Referee #1, 06 Sep 2018
RC2: 'Integrated optimization of wind turbines and wind farm layout', Anonymous Referee #2, 06 Oct 2018
AC1: 'Response to Referee 1', Andrew P. J. Stanley, 30 Oct 2018
AC2: 'Preprint version of our paper that is currently in review.', Andrew P. J. Stanley, 30 Oct 2018
AC3: 'Response to Referee 2', Andrew P. J. Stanley, 30 Oct 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Andrew P. J. Stanley on behalf of the Authors (31 Oct 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (04 Nov 2018) by Johan Meyers

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (07 Nov 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In the reply and the updated manuscript the authors did not fully incorporate all aspects indicated in my report. For some aspect it is sufficient that the replies for wind energy science are already online, where interested readers can look up the information. However, on some aspects the authors should provide more detailed information. Essentially all points below where address in my previous report, but were not fully addressed yet.

In the abstract remove the sentence.
"For our purposes, turbine design included hub height, rotor diameter, rated power, tower diameter, tower shell thickness, and implicit blade chord and twist distributions".
==> As indicated in my report it is important that the reader realizes that only 2 turbine designs are considered. This sentence may suggest otherwise to the reader.

And on page 2 line 5: at the sentence "coupled with as many as 18 additional variables for turbine design." Clarify that in the optimization of the actual wind farm only 2 turbine designs are selected. Not all 18 turbine variables are incorporated in the wind farm optimization.
==> For the reason mentioned above.

On page 3 a statement is added: "on a similar order to those discussed in the literature". Does this refer back to the previous results obtained by the authors? If so this should be specifically mentioned. The methodology in this study and the previous work of the authors is namely similar, so similar results are expected.

Page 3 line 25: "Second, in this paper we included the cost and structural impacts of changing the turbine design in our optimization objective and constraints."
==> This should be removed from the list of new aspects of this study. It's only discussed in the 5 lines of section 2.5, which essentially refers back to the previous work of the authors and is not a new aspect of this study, see also my previous report.

At the end of page 3 the authors added some statements along the line that they did "many different wind farm sizes, while all other literature only consider one or a few." This to me seems like an overstatement. Also in this study only 2 wind farm configurations are considered, basically with three different absolute sizes (the introduced scaling parameter beta). Of course the authors have to run many cases in the optimization procedure, but this is also true for other optimization papers.

Beginning of section 3:
I really appreciate the addition of the GitHub link with the optimized layouts. Ideally these are documented on the Wind Energy Science website directly to ensure they will remain available. Also for the Amalia Layout all plots state "Sequential Turbine design then layout optimization", i.e. the naming in some of the files does not seem to be updated when generating the plots. Please correct this. Please also specifically indicate what the large and small turbines are. I can make an educated guess, but it should be clear from the plots directly.

In the response the authors write on my question of the relation of the current work to the previous literature:
"These papers were added and explained in the literature review! This paper is the culmination of these two conference papers and the referenced journal submission."
==> I was expecting a short summary of what new aspect are discussed here in comparison to the literature and it would be good to still give this summary. I think this can also be worked out better in the actual manuscript (some of these aspects are also overstated, see above).

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (26 Dec 2018) by Johan Meyers

AR by Andrew P. J. Stanley on behalf of the Authors (03 Jan 2019) Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (09 Jan 2019) by Johan Meyers

ED: Publish as is (09 Jan 2019) by Jakob Mann (Chief editor)

AR by Andrew P. J. Stanley on behalf of the Authors (18 Jan 2019)

Short summary

We show that optimizing wind turbine design and wind turbine layout at the same time is superior to doing so sequentially. This coupled optimization can reduce the cost of energy by 2–5 % compared to sequential optimization. We also demonstrate that wind farms with closely spaced wind turbines can greatly benefit from different turbine designs throughout the farm. Heterogeneous turbine design can reduce the cost of energy by up to 10 % compared to farms with all identical turbines.