A verification of novel control schemes would not be complete without full-scale verification. In this project, we work on two measurement campaigns, one of a turbine controller optimised for wind farm control, and the other one in a full-scale offshore wind farm.
Implementation of the turbine controller on ORE Catapult's Samsung 7MW turbine in Levenmouth
The turbine controller needs have certain features to be most useful for wind farm control. We test those features on the Samsung 7MW turbine on ORE Catapult’s test bed in Levenmouth, Scotland. The controller for this turbine had originally been developed by project partner DNV-GL, and therefore they are ideally suited to teach the turbine some new tricks. The verification of the features is done by looking at the wind upstream and downstream of the turbine with a lidar, a wind measurement system based on lasers, which measures the speed of aerosol floating with the wind.
Experiment at the Lillgrund offshore wind farm
The full scale measurements are currently underway at project partner Vattenfall’s Lillgrund offshore wind farm, between Malmö and Copenhagen. Several strain gauges measure the mechanical loading of the turbines, and three scanning lidar systems measure the incoming wind and a “wall” of measurement points inside the wind farm. At the moment, they just record the normal operation of the wind farm, but eventually the setup will also test new wind farm control algorithms aiming at reducing the wake effect and reducing the loads on the turbines.
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