SMARTEOLE Field Test 1 is the first field test campaign realized in the scope of French national project SMARTEOLE. It was held at the wind farm Sole du Moulin Vieux (SMV) between October 2015 and September 2016. This campaign mainly consisted in the study of wind turbine wake behavior during normal operation but some basic wind farm control stategies were also investigated.
The experimental setup considered for this first wind measurement campaign is displayed on the picture below.
All field tests campaigns of the SMARTEOLE project were held at Sole du Moulin Vieux wind farm located in the northern region of France, approximately midway between Paris and Lille. It consists of 7 Senvion MM82 wind turbines at 80m hub height. The first 5 turbines (SMV1 to SMV5 in picture above) were commissioned in 2009, while the remaining two (SMV6 and SMV7) were added as an extension (officially named Les Kerles) in 2013. The wind farm is organized as a North-South layout, while the direction of the prevailing winds in this region of France is mostly South South-West. Consequently the wake losses of the farm are relatively low, however the two turbines SMV6 and SMV6 have an alignment which is much closer to the direction of prevailing winds which, combined with their close spacing, makes it an interesting case study for the analysis of wind turbine wake and wind farm control strategies.
The wind farm was extensively instrumented during this first wind measurement campaign:
The scanning lidar and SCADA data collected through these field tests were used to study wake behavior[1], calibrate (Duc et al. (2019)[2]) and compare several analytical wake models[3].
Both axial induction and wake steering control were investigated during this wind measurement campaign. The strategies tested and the results obtained are described in the subsections below.
The axial induction control tests were held between December 2015 and April 2016. They consisted in curtailing SMV6 (upstream turbine) up to 20% of its nominal power for south-westerly wind directions, in order to observe its wake behavior and its impact on SMV5 power (dowsntream turbine).
Due to the strong derating applied on the upstream turbine, no gain in combined power production could be achieved during these field tests. However, a clear increase in the downstream turbine power was observed when SMV6 turbine was curtailed. Moreover, a reduction in the wake-added turbulence intensity was also measured at the downstream turbine location. For more details about the results of these field tests, please consult the published work in Ahmad et al. (2018)[4] and Duc et al. (2019)[2:1].
The wake steering control tests were held during the summer in August and September 2016. They consisted in misaligning the SMV6 upstream turbine by -8° for 10 days and +12° for 3 weeks in order to observe the wake deflection at the downstream turbine SMV5.
Unfortunately, the wind conditions recorded during the period of time when SMV6 was misaligned were not very favourable, and only a limited amount of useful data have been retrieved from these tests. It was therefore not possible to conclude about the benefits of the wake steering strategy.
Torres Garcia et al., "Statistical characteristics of interacting wind turbine wakes from a 7-month LiDAR measurement campaign", Renewable Energy, 130, 1-11, 2019 ↩︎
Duc et al., "Local turbulence parameterization improves the Jensen wake model and its implementation for power optimization of an operating wind farm", Wind Energy Science, 4, 287–302, 2019 ↩︎ ↩︎
Hegazy et al., "LiDAR and SCADA data processing for interacting wind turbine wakes with comparison to analytical wake models", Renewable Energy, 181, 457-471, 2022 ↩︎
T. Ahmad, O. Coupiac, A. Petit, S. Guignard, N. Girard, B. Kazemtabrizi and P. Matthews, "Field Implementation and Trial of Coordinated Control of WIND Farms," IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, 9, 1169-1176, 2018 ↩︎
