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Published November 2018 | Published
Journal Article Open

Increasing the Power Production of Vertical-Axis Wind-Turbine Farms Using Synergistic Clustering

Abstract

Vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are being reconsidered as a complementary technology to the more widely used horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs) due to their unique suitability for offshore deployments. In addition, field experiments have confirmed that vertical-axis wind turbines can interact synergistically to enhance the total power production when placed in close proximity. Here, we use an actuator line model in a large-eddy simulation to test novel VAWT farm configurations that exploit these synergistic interactions. We first design clusters with three turbines each that preserve the omni-directionality of vertical-axis wind turbines, and optimize the distance between the clustered turbines. We then configure farms based on clusters, rather than individual turbines. The simulations confirm that vertical-axis wind turbines have a positive influence on each other when packed in well-designed clusters: such configurations increase the power generation of a single turbine by about 10 percent. In addition, the cluster designs allow for closer turbine spacing resulting in about three times the number of turbines for a given land area compared to conventional configurations. Therefore, both the turbine and wind-farm efficiencies are improved, leading to a significant increase in the density of power production per unit land area.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Received: 14 June 2017; Accepted: 04 June 2018; First Online: 06 July 2018. This work was supported by the Siebel Energy Challenge and the Andlinger Centre for Energy and the Environment of Princeton University. The simulations were performed on the supercomputing clusters of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research through project P36861020 and UPRI0007, and of Princeton University.

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Created:
September 15, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023