Within wind farms, the wind turbines interact with each other through their wakes. Turbines operating in these wakes have lower power production and increased wear and tear. Wake redirection is control strategy to steer the wakes aside from downstream turbines, increasing the power yield of the farm. Models for predicting the power gain and impacts on wear exist, but they are still immature and require validation. The validation of such a model is the purpose of this paper.

Airborne wind energy systems aim to operate at altitudes above conventional wind turbines where reliable high-resolution wind data are scarce. Wind measurements and computational simulations both have advantages and disadvantages when assessing the wind resource at such heights. This article investigates whether assimilating measurements into the model generates a more accurate wind data set up to 1100 m. These wind data sets are used to estimate optimal AWES operating altitudes and power.

This work is dedicated to the non-Gaussian statistics of wind velocity jumps and their effect on wind turbines, more specifically on fatigue loads. Wind velocity jumps are commonly simplified to behave in a Gaussian manner. This study discusses how to compare non-Gaussian to Gaussian wind fields properly and shows that the non-Gaussianity in fact can make a difference with respect to fatigue loads. Additionally, we highlight the dependence of our findings on the wind field's coherence.

We present a model that both (1) reduces the computational effort involved in analyzing design trade-offs and (2) provides a qualitative understanding of the root cause of fatigue and extreme structural loads for wind turbine components from the blades to the tower base. We use this model in conjunction with design loads from high-fidelity simulations to analyze and compare the trade-offs between power capture and structural loading for large rotor concepts.

The numerical flow simulation solvers are extensively used for site assessment in the wind energy industry. However, due to the complexity of flow regimes, it is essential to calibrate the important parameters of such algorithms with measurement data. In this paper, we present a computationally cheap (adjoint) solver that can be coupled with any standard gradient-based optimizer to calibrate the inflow boundary of a CFD solver using the wind speed measurements from the interior of a domain.

We have performed computer simulations of turbulent air over hills with wind turbines located on the hill tops. Behind the wind turbines the wind speed is reduced and the air is even more turbulent. Together we call these features for the wind turbine wake. We find that the wake has a self-similar shape. This means that its shape is only a function of the reduced wind speed found in the wake and the width of the wake and hence not of the complexity and shape of the hills.

Wind farm layouts are designed by simple engineering wake models, which are fast to compute but also include a high uncertainty. Higher-fidelity models, such as Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes, can be used to verify optimized wind farm layouts, although the computational costs are high due to the large number of cases that are needed to calculate the annual energy production. This article presents a new wind turbine control method to speed up the high-fidelity simulations by a factor of 2–3.

This work presents an improvement to a popular algorithm used in the prediction of the power of vertical axis wind turbines. While, until now, the algorithm was considered valid only for low rotor speeds and a small number of blades, our improvement makes it valid for any configuration. The predictions of the improved algorithm were found to be of considerable accuracy, when validated with measurements of a small model turbine acquired in a compressed air wind tunnel.

When designing a wind farm, one crucial step is finding the correct location or optimizing the location of the wind turbines to maximize power production. In the past, optimizing the turbine layout of large wind farms has been difficult because of the large number of interacting variables. In this paper, we present the boundary-grid parameterization method, which defines the layout of any wind farm with only five variables, allowing people to study and design wind farms regardless of the size.

A novel lidar-based sensory system for wind turbine control is proposed. The main contributions are the parametrization method of the novel measurement system, the identification of possible sources of measurement uncertainty, and their modelling. Although not the focus of the submitted paper, the mentioned contributions represent essential building blocks for robust feedback–feedforward wind turbine control development which could be used to improve wind turbine control strategies.