Many considerations go into the design of a wind farm, a huge one being their physical design — spacing and orienting individual turbines to maximize efficiency and minimize any wake effects where the swooping blades of one reduces the energy in the wind available for others. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have developed a new way to study these wake effects.
Simple computer models have traditionally been used to determine the best turbine design, which works well for small wind farms, but is less precise for larger wind farms where the wakes interact with one another and the overall effect is harder to predict.
The new method takes into account the airflow both within and around a wind farm and challenges the conventional belief that turbines arrayed in checkerboard patterns produce the highest power output — important considerations for increased power output, especially in places with strong prevailing winds. Optimally spacing turbines allows them to capture more wind, produce more power and increase revenue for the farm.
“It’s important to consider these configurations in test cases,” said Richard Stevens, one of the researchers. “If turbines are built in a non-optimal arrangement, the amount of electricity produced would be less and so would the revenue of the wind farm.”
Common test cases are wind farms in which turbines are either installed in rows, which will be aligned against prevailing wind, or in staggered checkerboard-style blocks where each row of turbines is spaced between the gaps in the previous row. Staggered farms are generally preferred because they harvest more energy in a smaller footprint, but the research shows that the checkerboard style can be improved in some cases. Specifically, better power output may be obtained through an “intermediate” staggering, where each row is imperfectly offset like a checkerboard that has slipped slightly out of place, the research indicates.
Source: Fierceenergy.com