Abstracted/indexed

Over the past few decades, single-rotor wind turbines have increased in size with the blades being extended toward lengths of 100 m. An alternative upscaling of turbines can be achieved by using multi-rotor wind turbines. In this article, measurements and numerical simulations of a utility-scale four-rotor wind turbine show that rotor interaction leads to increased energy production and faster wake recovery; these findings may allow for the design of wind farms with improved energy production.

Wake steering is a form of wind farm control in which turbines use yaw offsets to affect wakes in order to yield an increase in total energy production. In this first phase of a study of wake steering at a commercial wind farm, two turbines implement a schedule of offsets. For two closely spaced turbines, an approximate 14 % increase in energy was measured on the downstream turbine over a 10° sector, with a 4 % increase in energy production of the combined turbine pair.

In this paper the results of the stability analysis of a free-yawing downwind turbine are shown and the turbine's ability to align the rotor passively with the wind direction is investigated. The results show that a tilt angle causes the equilibrium yaw position of free-yawing downwind to be non-zero. It is shown that an increase in cone angle can stabilize the free-yaw mode significantly, while blade flapwise flexibility will increase the risk of an instability of the free-yaw mode.