Wind-tunnel analysis of wake-steering control strategies on a multi-column model wind farm

Abstract. Wake-steering control has the potential of improving the power production of wind farms by deflecting the wakes of upstream turbines away from the downstream ones, thereby increasing the velocity impinging on the latter by sacrificing the performance of the former. In this work, a wide range of wake-steering control strategies are systematically applied to a 3 × 3 wind farm in a series of wind-tunnel experiments. When each streamwise column is operated identically to the others, the maximum measured power gain is approximately 5.3 %. It is observed that the columns respond differently to a given yaw configuration, with the central one generally improving to a smaller degree than the lateral ones. Nevertheless, our data indicate that tuning each column independently of the others does not result in further power improvements. Furthermore, we show that increasing the free-stream velocity enhances the baseline power production of the model farm but reduces the scope for improvement achievable with wake-steering control.