A novel yaw wake model for wind farm control applications

Yaw control is a potential control strategy to redirect the wakes of wind turbines for the purpose of improving the wind farm performance. Because of its time-consuming nature, high fidelity numerical simulations are hard to be applied in engineering applications. Instead, a simple and efficient engineering wake model is preferable. In this paper, a novel yaw wake model is developed in the following three steps: a novel wake velocity model for non-yawed wind turbines is first developed; second, a novel wake deflection model is developed to overcome the shortcomings in existing models; and third, a novel wake model for yawed wind turbines is developed. To verify its accuracy, the results of the novel yaw wake model implemented in the in-house Analytical Wake Model Calculator (AWMC) are validated against experimental data and simulation results. Moreover, the comparisons with a few existing yaw wake models show its superiority. In terms of error, the overall accuracy of the wake deflection model is enhanced by more than 20 % compared to other models in all cases. In addition, the overall accuracy of the novel yaw wake distribution model is improved by at least 10 % in most cases as compared to state-of-the-art yaw wake models.