Sebastiano Stipa, Arjun Ajay, D. Allaerts, J. Brinkerhoff
{"title":"The multi-scale coupled model: a new framework capturing wind farm–atmosphere interaction and global blockage effects","authors":"Sebastiano Stipa, Arjun Ajay, D. Allaerts, J. Brinkerhoff","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-1123-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-1123-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. The growth in the number and size of wind energy projects in the last decade has revealed structural limitations in the current approach adopted by the wind industry to assess potential wind farm sites. These limitations are the result of neglecting the mutual interaction of large wind farms and the thermally stratified atmospheric boundary layer. While currently available analytical models are sufficiently accurate to conduct site assessments for isolated rotors or small wind turbine clusters, the wind farm's interaction with the atmosphere cannot be neglected for large-size arrays. Specifically, the wind farm displaces the boundary layer vertically, triggering atmospheric gravity waves that induce large-scale horizontal pressure gradients. These perturbations in pressure alter the velocity field at the turbine locations, ultimately affecting global wind farm power production. The implication of such dynamics can also produce an extended blockage region upstream of the first turbines and a favorable pressure gradient inside the wind farm. In this paper, we present the multi-scale coupled (MSC) model, a novel approach that allows the simultaneous prediction of micro-scale effects occurring at the wind turbine scale, such as individual wake interactions and rotor induction, and meso-scale phenomena occurring at the wind farm scale and larger, such as atmospheric gravity waves. This is achieved by evaluating wake models on a spatially heterogeneous background velocity field obtained from a reduced-order meso-scale model. Verification of the MSC model is performed against two large-eddy simulations (LESs) with similar average inflow velocity profiles and a different capping inversion strength, so that two distinct interfacial gravity wave regimes are produced, i.e. subcritical and supercritical. Interfacial waves can produce high blockage in the first case, as they are allowed to propagate upstream. On the other hand, in the supercritical regime their propagation speed is less than their advection velocity, and upstream blockage is only operated by internal waves. The MSC model not only proves to successfully capture both local induction and global blockage effects in the two analyzed regimes, but also captures the interaction between the wind farm and gravity waves, underestimating wind farm power by about only 2 % compared with the LES results. Conversely, wake models alone cannot distinguish between differences in thermal stratification, even if combined with a local induction model. Specifically, they are affected by a first-row overprediction bias that leads to an overestimation of the wind farm power by 13 % to 20 % for the modeled regimes.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141001825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Backstrom, Nicholas M. Warden, Colleen Marie Walsh
{"title":"Optimizing offshore wind export cable routing using GIS-based environmental heat maps","authors":"J. Backstrom, Nicholas M. Warden, Colleen Marie Walsh","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-1105-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-1105-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. In the United States, there are plans to produce up to 30 GW of offshore wind power by the year 2030, resulting in numerous seabed lease areas which are currently going through the leasing or construction and operations phase. A key challenge associated with offshore wind is optimal routing and installation of the subsea power cables, which transmit power from the main offshore wind energy production area to a land-based station, where it connects to the electrical grid. By traversing a vast extent of the seafloor, the installation and operational phases of subsea power cables have the potential to result in a range of environmental impacts, which may negatively affect sensitive biological, physical, human and/or cultural resource receptors. Presented here is a case study from southeastern North Carolina to identify optimal seabed cable routes and coastal landfalls for a recently leased offshore wind farm by using a combination of publicly available data, coupled with standard environmental impact assessment methodologies and geographic information system (GIS)-based heat maps. The study identified a range of high-risk areas, in addition to a number of potential low-risk routes and landfall areas which minimize seabed user conflicts and impacts on environmentally sensitive locations. Although additional high-resolution and site-specific environmental, geological and biological surveys are required to develop a robust cable installation plan, the preliminary steps from this research optimize early-phase marine spatial planning for offshore wind projects and other similar subsea industries.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141001345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Effect of scour on the fatigue life of offshore wind turbines and its prevention through passive structural control","authors":"Yu Cao, Ningyu Wu, Jigang Yang, Chao Chen, Ronghua Zhu, Xugang Hua","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-1089-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-1089-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. Offshore wind turbine (OWT) support structures are exposed to the risk of fatigue damage and scour, and this risk can be effectively mitigated by installing structural control devices such as tuned mass dampers (TMDs). However, time-varying scour altering OWTs' dynamic characteristics has an impact on the TMD design and fatigue life, which has rarely been studied before. In this paper, a simplified modal model is used to investigate the influence of scour and a TMD on the fatigue life evaluation of a 5 MW OWT's support structure, and a traditional method and a newly developed optimization technique are both presented to obtain TMD parameters. This optimization technique aims at finding optimal parameters of the TMD which maximize the fatigue life of a hotspot at the mudline, and the effect of time-varying scour can be considered. This study assumes that the TMD operates in the fore–aft (FA) direction, while the vibration in the side–side (SS) direction is uncontrolled. Results show that scour can decrease the fatigue life by about 24.1 % and that the TMD can effectively suppress vibration and increase the fatigue life. When the scour depth reaches 1.3 times the pile diameter, the TMD with a mass ratio of 1 % can increase the fatigue life of an OWT's support structure by about 64.6 %. Further, it is found that the fatigue life can be extended by 25 % with the TMD optimized by the proposed optimization technique rather than using a traditional design method which does not take the change in dynamic characteristics into account.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141004801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Going beyond BEM with BEM: an insight into dynamic inflow effects on floating wind turbines","authors":"F. Papi, J. Jonkman, A. Robertson, A. Bianchini","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-1069-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-1069-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. Blade element momentum (BEM) theory is the backbone of many industry-standard wind turbine aerodynamic models. To be applied to a broader set of engineering problems, BEM models have been extended since their inception and now include several empirical corrections. These models have benefitted from decades of development and refinement and have been extensively used and validated, proving their adequacy in predicting aerodynamic forces of horizontal-axis wind turbine rotors in most scenarios. However, the analysis of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) introduces new sets of challenges, especially if new-generation large and flexible machines are considered. In fact, due to the combined action of wind and waves and their interaction with the turbine structure and control system, these machines are subject to unsteady motion and thus unsteady inflow on the wind turbine's blades, which could put BEM models to the test. Consensus has not been reached on the accuracy limits of BEM in these conditions. This study contributes to the ongoing research on the topic by systematically comparing four different aerodynamic models, ranging from BEM to computational fluid dynamics, in an attempt to shed light on the unsteady aerodynamic phenomena that are at stake in FOWTs and whether BEM is able to model them appropriately. Simulations are performed on the UNAFLOW 1:75 scale rotor during imposed harmonic surge and pitch motion. Experimental results are available for these conditions and are used for baseline validation. The rotor is analyzed in both rated operating conditions and low wind speeds, where unsteady aerodynamic effects are expected to be more pronounced. Results show that BEM, despite its simplicity, can adequately model the aerodynamics of FOWTs in most conditions if augmented with a dynamic inflow model.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141017128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel Ribnitzky, Frederik Berger, V. Petrović, Martin Kühn
{"title":"Hybrid-Lambda: a low-specific-rating rotor concept for offshore wind turbines","authors":"Daniel Ribnitzky, Frederik Berger, V. Petrović, Martin Kühn","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-359-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-359-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. We introduce an aerodynamic rotor concept for an offshore wind turbine which is tailored for an increased power feed-in at low wind speeds by a substantial increase in the rotor diameter while maintaining the rated power. The main objective of the conceptual design is to limit the steady-inflow loads (blade flapwise root bending moment (RBM) and thrust) to the maximum values of a reference turbine. The outer part of the blade (i.e. outer 30 % span) is designed for a higher design tip speed ratio (TSR) and a lower axial induction than the inner part. By operating at the high TSR in light winds, the slender outer part fully contributes to the increased power capture. In stronger winds the TSR is reduced and the torque generation is shifted to the inner section of the rotor. Moreover, the blade design efficiently reduces the power losses when the flapwise RBM is limited through peak shaving, below rated wind speed. This is of high importance, given the wind speed distribution at offshore sites. The characteristics of the rotor are first investigated with stationary blade element momentum simulations and further analysed with aeroelastic simulations, considering the flexibility of blades and tower to show that a structural design is feasible even for a blade of this size and complexity. The economic revenue and the cost of valued energy of the turbine are estimated and compared to the IEA 15 MW offshore reference turbine, considering a fictitious wind-speed-dependent feed-in price. Our results for the turbine concept with an increase in rotor diameter by 36 % show that the revenue can be increased by 30 % and the cost of valued energy can be reduced by 16 % compared to the reference turbine.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139833638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel Ribnitzky, Frederik Berger, V. Petrović, Martin Kühn
{"title":"Hybrid-Lambda: a low-specific-rating rotor concept for offshore wind turbines","authors":"Daniel Ribnitzky, Frederik Berger, V. Petrović, Martin Kühn","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-359-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-359-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. We introduce an aerodynamic rotor concept for an offshore wind turbine which is tailored for an increased power feed-in at low wind speeds by a substantial increase in the rotor diameter while maintaining the rated power. The main objective of the conceptual design is to limit the steady-inflow loads (blade flapwise root bending moment (RBM) and thrust) to the maximum values of a reference turbine. The outer part of the blade (i.e. outer 30 % span) is designed for a higher design tip speed ratio (TSR) and a lower axial induction than the inner part. By operating at the high TSR in light winds, the slender outer part fully contributes to the increased power capture. In stronger winds the TSR is reduced and the torque generation is shifted to the inner section of the rotor. Moreover, the blade design efficiently reduces the power losses when the flapwise RBM is limited through peak shaving, below rated wind speed. This is of high importance, given the wind speed distribution at offshore sites. The characteristics of the rotor are first investigated with stationary blade element momentum simulations and further analysed with aeroelastic simulations, considering the flexibility of blades and tower to show that a structural design is feasible even for a blade of this size and complexity. The economic revenue and the cost of valued energy of the turbine are estimated and compared to the IEA 15 MW offshore reference turbine, considering a fictitious wind-speed-dependent feed-in price. Our results for the turbine concept with an increase in rotor diameter by 36 % show that the revenue can be increased by 30 % and the cost of valued energy can be reduced by 16 % compared to the reference turbine.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139773965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An experimental study on the aerodynamic loads of a floating offshore wind turbine under imposed motions","authors":"F. Taruffi, Felipe Novais, A. Viré","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-343-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-343-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. The rotor of a floating wind turbine is subject to complex aerodynamics due to changes in relative wind speeds at the blades and potential local interactions between blade sections and the rotor near wake. These complex interactions are not yet fully understood. Lab-scale experiments are highly relevant for capturing these phenomena and provide means for the validation of numerical design tools. This paper presents a new wind tunnel experimental setup able to study the aerodynamic response of a wind turbine rotor when subjected to prescribed motions. The present study uses a 1:148 scale model of the DTU 10 MW reference wind turbine mounted on top of a 6 degrees of freedom parallel kinematic robotic platform. Firstly, the thrust variation of the turbine is investigated when single degree of freedom harmonic motions are imposed by the platform, with surge, pitch and yaw being considered in this study. For reduced frequencies greater than 1.2, it is found that the thrust variation is amplified by up to 150 % compared to the quasi-steady value when the turbine is subject to pitch and surge motions, regardless of the amplitude of motion. A similar behaviour is also noticed under yaw motions. Secondly, realistic 6 degrees of freedom motions are imposed by the platform. The motions are derived from FAST simulations performed on the full-scale turbine coupled with the TripleSpar floater, and the tests aim at exploring the thrust force dynamics for different sea states and wind conditions, obtaining reasonable agreement with the simulations. Finally, the work shows the capabilities of an off-the-shelf hexapod to conduct hybrid testing of floating offshore wind turbines in wind tunnels, as well as its limitations in performing such tests.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139779760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An experimental study on the aerodynamic loads of a floating offshore wind turbine under imposed motions","authors":"F. Taruffi, Felipe Novais, A. Viré","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-343-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-343-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. The rotor of a floating wind turbine is subject to complex aerodynamics due to changes in relative wind speeds at the blades and potential local interactions between blade sections and the rotor near wake. These complex interactions are not yet fully understood. Lab-scale experiments are highly relevant for capturing these phenomena and provide means for the validation of numerical design tools. This paper presents a new wind tunnel experimental setup able to study the aerodynamic response of a wind turbine rotor when subjected to prescribed motions. The present study uses a 1:148 scale model of the DTU 10 MW reference wind turbine mounted on top of a 6 degrees of freedom parallel kinematic robotic platform. Firstly, the thrust variation of the turbine is investigated when single degree of freedom harmonic motions are imposed by the platform, with surge, pitch and yaw being considered in this study. For reduced frequencies greater than 1.2, it is found that the thrust variation is amplified by up to 150 % compared to the quasi-steady value when the turbine is subject to pitch and surge motions, regardless of the amplitude of motion. A similar behaviour is also noticed under yaw motions. Secondly, realistic 6 degrees of freedom motions are imposed by the platform. The motions are derived from FAST simulations performed on the full-scale turbine coupled with the TripleSpar floater, and the tests aim at exploring the thrust force dynamics for different sea states and wind conditions, obtaining reasonable agreement with the simulations. Finally, the work shows the capabilities of an off-the-shelf hexapod to conduct hybrid testing of floating offshore wind turbines in wind tunnels, as well as its limitations in performing such tests.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139839575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rafael Valotta Rodrigues, Mads Mølgaard Pedersen, Jens Peter Schøler, Julian Quick, Pierre-Elouan Réthoré
{"title":"Speeding up large-wind-farm layout optimization using gradients, parallelization, and a heuristic algorithm for the initial layout","authors":"Rafael Valotta Rodrigues, Mads Mølgaard Pedersen, Jens Peter Schøler, Julian Quick, Pierre-Elouan Réthoré","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-321-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-321-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. As the use of wind energy expands worldwide, the wind energy industry is considering building larger clusters of turbines. Existing computational methods to design and optimize the layout of wind farms are well suited for medium-sized plants; however, these approaches need to be improved to ensure efficient scaling to large wind farms. This work investigates strategies for covering this gap, focusing on gradient-based (GB) approaches. We investigated the main bottlenecks of the problem, including the computational time per iteration, multi-start for GB optimization, and the number of iterations to achieve convergence. The open-source tools PyWake and TOPFARM were used to carry out the numerical experiments. The results show algorithmic differentiation (AD) as an effective strategy for reducing the time per iteration. The speedup reached by AD scales linearly with the number of wind turbines, reaching 75 times for a wind farm with 500 wind turbines. However, memory requirements may make AD unfeasible on personal computers or for larger farms. Moreover, flow case parallelization was found to reduce the time per iteration, but the speedup remains roughly constant with the number of wind turbines. Therefore, top-level parallelization of each multi-start was found to be a more efficient approach for GB optimization. The handling of spacing constraints was found to dominate the iteration time for large wind farms. In this study, we ran the optimizations without spacing constraints and observed that all wind turbines were separated by at least 1.4 D. The number of iterations until convergence was found to scale linearly with the number of wind turbines by a factor of 2.3, but further investigation is necessary for generalizations. Furthermore, we have found that initializing the layouts using a heuristic approach called Smart-Start (SMAST) significantly reduced the number of multi-starts during GB optimization. Running only one optimization for a wind farm with 279 turbines initialized with SMAST resulted in a higher final annual energy production (AEP) than 5000 optimizations initialized with random layouts. Finally, estimates for the total time reduction were made assuming that the trends found in this work for the time per iteration, number of iterations, and number of multi-starts hold for larger wind farms. One optimization of a wind farm with 500 wind turbines combining SMAST, AD, and flow case parallelization and without spacing constraints takes 15.6 h, whereas 5000 optimizations with random initial layouts, finite differences, spacing constraints, and top-level parallelization are expected to take around 300 years.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139856144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rafael Valotta Rodrigues, Mads Mølgaard Pedersen, Jens Peter Schøler, Julian Quick, Pierre-Elouan Réthoré
{"title":"Speeding up large-wind-farm layout optimization using gradients, parallelization, and a heuristic algorithm for the initial layout","authors":"Rafael Valotta Rodrigues, Mads Mølgaard Pedersen, Jens Peter Schøler, Julian Quick, Pierre-Elouan Réthoré","doi":"10.5194/wes-9-321-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-9-321-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract. As the use of wind energy expands worldwide, the wind energy industry is considering building larger clusters of turbines. Existing computational methods to design and optimize the layout of wind farms are well suited for medium-sized plants; however, these approaches need to be improved to ensure efficient scaling to large wind farms. This work investigates strategies for covering this gap, focusing on gradient-based (GB) approaches. We investigated the main bottlenecks of the problem, including the computational time per iteration, multi-start for GB optimization, and the number of iterations to achieve convergence. The open-source tools PyWake and TOPFARM were used to carry out the numerical experiments. The results show algorithmic differentiation (AD) as an effective strategy for reducing the time per iteration. The speedup reached by AD scales linearly with the number of wind turbines, reaching 75 times for a wind farm with 500 wind turbines. However, memory requirements may make AD unfeasible on personal computers or for larger farms. Moreover, flow case parallelization was found to reduce the time per iteration, but the speedup remains roughly constant with the number of wind turbines. Therefore, top-level parallelization of each multi-start was found to be a more efficient approach for GB optimization. The handling of spacing constraints was found to dominate the iteration time for large wind farms. In this study, we ran the optimizations without spacing constraints and observed that all wind turbines were separated by at least 1.4 D. The number of iterations until convergence was found to scale linearly with the number of wind turbines by a factor of 2.3, but further investigation is necessary for generalizations. Furthermore, we have found that initializing the layouts using a heuristic approach called Smart-Start (SMAST) significantly reduced the number of multi-starts during GB optimization. Running only one optimization for a wind farm with 279 turbines initialized with SMAST resulted in a higher final annual energy production (AEP) than 5000 optimizations initialized with random layouts. Finally, estimates for the total time reduction were made assuming that the trends found in this work for the time per iteration, number of iterations, and number of multi-starts hold for larger wind farms. One optimization of a wind farm with 500 wind turbines combining SMAST, AD, and flow case parallelization and without spacing constraints takes 15.6 h, whereas 5000 optimizations with random initial layouts, finite differences, spacing constraints, and top-level parallelization are expected to take around 300 years.\u0000","PeriodicalId":509667,"journal":{"name":"Wind Energy Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139796560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}