Tip Speed Ratio Optimization: More Energy Production with Reduced Rotor Speed

A wind turbine’s tip speed ratio (TSR) is the linear speed of the blade’s tip, normalized by the incoming wind speed. For a given blade profile, there is a TSR that maximizes the turbine’s efficiency. The industry’s current practice is to impose the same TSR that maximizes the efficiency of a single, isolated wind turbine on every turbine of a wind farm. This article proves that this strategy is wrong. The article demonstrates that in every wind direction, there is always a subset of turbines that needs to operate at non-efficient conditions to provide more energy to some of their downstream counterparts to boost the farm’s overall production. The aerodynamic interactions between the turbines cause this. The authors employed the well-known Jensen wake model in concert with Particle Swarm Optimization to demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy at Lillgrund, a wind farm in Sweden. The model’s formulation and implementation were validated using large-eddy simulation results. The AEP of Lillgrund increased by approximately 4% by optimizing and actively controlling the TSR. This strategy also decreased the farm’s overall TSR, defined as the average TSR of the turbines, by 8%, leading to several structural and environmental benefits. Note that both these values are farm-dependent and change from one farm to another; hence, this research serves as a proof of concept.