Numerical investigation of the yawed wake and its effects on the downstream wind turbine

A numerical simulation for the wake deviation effect in a wind farm is carried out using the full rotor model of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 5 MW wind turbine. The downstream wind turbine decreases its performance significantly due to the upstream wake interference. To reduce this effect, a control strategy based on the yaw angle is adopted to skew the trajectory of an upstream wake, thereby avoiding the downstream wind turbine and improving the efficiency of whole wind farm power generation. In this paper, the commercial CFD software STAR-CCM+ was used to simulate the wind farm which contains two tandem wind turbines operating in the atmospheric boundary layer condition. The results show that the wind farm's total power increases when the upstream wind turbine applies a yaw angle intentionally. According to the analysis of velocity contours, wake centerlines, and vortex structures, a counter-rotating blade tip vortex pair is observed to be responsible for the wake deviation effects concentrated on the hub height, which reveals that the influence of a yawed wake on the downstream wind turbine may be slightly underestimated.