The effect of blockage on power production for laterally aligned wind turbines

This paper studies the change in the individual power coefficients for a laterally aligned row of wind turbines over a single, free turbine in the context of varying inflow directions via numerical simulations. All turbines were rotating in-line with the main flow direction. The problem definition is similar to that of many wind turbine testing sites and wind farms.

Hence any changes in the individual turbine power production could have implications regarding power curve validation procedures. These changes are relatively small and therefore the size of the computational domain was identified to be detrimental in avoiding any domain-inflicted blockage. Increasing the misalignment of the main flow direction with the row of turbines led to significant variations in the power production across turbines.

At the largest inflow angle of 45 it varied from -1.1 % to 2 %. As a whole, the power production increased by about 0.5 %, almost independent of the inflow direction.