Comparative study on a newly-developed three-dimensional wind turbine wake model

Abstract

In this paper, an analytical three-dimensional wake model is developed to study the wind turbine wake effect and the model is compared with the existing one-dimensional wake model. With the fast development of both onshore and offshore wind energy, wind turbines are upsizing rapidly and the simple assumption of one-dimensional wake model is not suitable for large wind turbines. The commonly used one-dimensional wake model is impossible to describe the spatial distribution accurately as it assumes that the wind deficit is linear distributed along the downwind distance. While the three-dimensional wake model is an effective way to solve this problem. This wake model assumes the wake deficit as Gaussian shaped and considers wind speed variation along height direction as well. In this study, the wind tunnel measurement validation of the three-dimensional wake model is demonstrated which is used to calculate the wind deficit at a downstream position. Next, the results are compared to the one-dimensional wake model's results. An error analysis and discussions are then conducted based on the comparisons. From this study, the new three-dimensional wake model contributes to the wake distribution study for researchers and a proper wake model can help developing optimized wind farm layouts as well.