Modeling and maximizing power in wind turbine arrays

This paper considers wind turbine arrays, and explores algorithms for determining individual axial induction factors that optimize overall energy extraction. Wind turbine arrays, or wind farms, can be viewed as large coupled networks, for which the application of traditional optimization techniques are impractical. We consider a dynamic programming approach to maximize power extraction under the condition of uniform wind. Recent work has used a dynamic programming approach for a near-field approximate solution. In this paper we present a heuristic method to find solutions to both the near-field and the far-field problems. Simulation results are discussed, which demonstrate our algorithm provides improved performance compared to prior work on near-field approaches.