Farm-to-Farm Dynamics and Their Impact on Wind Farm Wake Recovery

As renewable energy generation grows in importance, increasing scrutiny is placed on the balance between land usage and power production in wind farms, with multi-array or neighboring sites becoming more attractive for utility-scale systems. Maximum efficiency of multi-farm sites is dependent on the understanding of the relationships of farm wake dynamics and how this affects recovery and production for downstream turbine arrays. This research includes farm-to-farm relationships in order to understand how turbine and farm spacing affects multi-farm systems. Scaled porous disks were placed in two arrays in the ForWind wind tunnel at varying distance between arrays (S_x = {10D, 20D, 40D}). Time-resolved particle image velocimetry was used to capture the wakes of both arrays at x/D = 10 to 40. Mean and center tracking on the individual turbine wakes showed meandering responses dependent on spanwise location. Adjusting S_x shows a compounding impact of the upstream wake on downstream farm dynamics, reflected in full-farm wake width, expansion, and recovery. This new understanding on turbine array spacing affects large-scale farm design and motivates future research on farm-to-farm wake relations.