Optimisation of wind and tidal turbine farms

David Roger Lande-Sudall will present the topic "Optimisation of wind and tidal turbine farms" on Tuesday November 26th.

Abstract: Cost of energy from offshore wind is strongly influenced by planning of the farm layout. Optimisation of layout is a necessarily multi-objective problem, encompassing maximising energy yield, minimising loads and cabling distances, all for a temporally and spatially variable met-ocean resource. Existing work in this field has often involved turbine wake models incapable of capturing accurate flow physics, or else been too computationally demanding to model gigawatt-scale farms. Similar problems occur for optimisation of tidal stream turbine arrays, upon which this recent study draws. Here, optimisation of turbine layouts using a computationally efficient and experimentally validated wake model is compared within different hybrid global-local optimisation algorithms. Computational efficiency is found to be very dependent on the degrees of freedom to the problem and noise within the cost-function. Current uncertainties to the wake model are discussed, along with a brief introduction to on-going work implementing high-fidelity CFD wake models.

The seminar will be held from 12:15 to 13:00 (we open the doors at 12:00) in "Fyrrommet" at HVL Kronstad (you find it through the library at the ground floor). As always it is free and open to all interested parties, so bring your lunch and join us for an interesting presentation followed by a Q&A session.