Development of a high fidelity CFD code for wind farm control

In this paper we describe an effort recently completed at UT Dallas to develop a high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics code to test and develop control algorithms aimed at maximizing power production and load mitigation. Preliminary results of three aligned turbines operating at different tip speed ratios (TSRs) are discussed to show the wealth of details available from the present code. The finer solution of the flow physics allows to gain a better understanding of how control algorithms should be designed and implemented in practical configurations. The paper includes a detailed analysis of the power and loads for optimal TSRs obtained by applying dynamic programming to a low-fidelity analytical model.