Study of blockage and wakes for an on-shore Wind Farm using SCADA data and CFD simulations

The ever-changing energy scenario call for a central role of wind energy exploitation within the renewable energy portfolio; the wind resource nowadays is a very precious means of clean energy production and year by year its degree of reliability and efficiency is pushed towards the optimum. For these reasons two topics are now very important for the improving further the conversion performances: the study of the blockage, as nowadays a lot of machines are planned to be installed in the neighbors of existing ones, and the analysis of wakes, as they represent still the main source of losses and reliability issues. For this reason in the present study, which is an example of collaboration between academia and industry, a deep analysis of wind farm flow, blockage, and wake effects was developed using numerical simulations and real-world operational data from an on-shore windfarm owned by Lucky Wind. Results demonstrate the fundamental role of CFD numerical simulation in understanding and interpreting the complex physics of wakes and the overall importance of blockage effects.