As finite energy resources are being consumed at faster rate than they can be replaced, renewable energy resources have drawn extensive attention. Wind power development is one such example growing significantly throughout the world. The main difficulty in wind power development is that wind turbines interfere with each other. The produced turbulence—wake effect—directly reduces the power generation. In addition, wirelength of the collection network among wind turbines is not merely an economic factor; it also decides power loss on the wind farm. Moreover, in reality, obstacles (buildings, lakes, etc.) exist on the wind farm, which are unavoidable. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing works consider wake effect, wirelength, and avoidance of obstacles all together in the wind turbine placement problem. In this article, we propose an analytical method to obtain the obstacle-avoiding placement of wind turbines, thus minimizing both power loss and wake effect. We also propose a postprocessing method to fine-tune the solution obtained from the analytical method to find a better solution. Simulation results show that our tool is 12x faster than the state-of-the-art industrial tool AWS OpenWind and 203x faster than the state-of-the-art academic tool TDA with almost the same produced power.
['Yu-Wei Wu', 'Yiyu Shi', 'Sudip Roy', 'Tsung-Yi Ho']
Obstacle-Avoiding Wind Turbine Placement for Power Loss and Wake Effect Optimization