Optimizing wind farm control through wake steering using surrogate models based on high-fidelity simulations

Abstract. This paper aims to develop fast and reliable surrogate models for yaw-based wind farm control. The surrogates, based on polynomial chaos expansion (PCE), are built using high-fidelity flow simulations coupled with aeroelastic simulations of the turbine performance and loads. Developing a model for wind farm control is a challenging control problem due to the time-varying dynamics of the wake. The wind farm control strategy is optimized for both the power output and the loading of the turbines. The optimization performed using two Vestas V27 turbines in a row for a specific atmospheric condition suggests that a power gain of almost 3%±1% can be achieved at close spacing by yawing the upstream turbine more than 15∘ . At larger spacing the optimization shows that yawing is not beneficial as the optimization reverts to normal operation. Furthermore, it was also identified that a reduction in the equivalent loads was obtained at the cost of power production. The total power gains are discussed in relation to the associated model errors and the uncertainty of the surrogate models used in the optimization, as well as the implications for wind farm control.