LES investigation of infinite staggered wind-turbine arrays

The layouts of turbines affect the turbine wake interactions and thus the wind farm performance. The wake interactions in infinite staggered wind-turbine arrays are investigated and compared with infinite aligned turbine arrays in this paper. From the numerical results we identify three types of wake behaviours, which are significantly different from wakes in aligned wind-turbine arrays. For the first type, each turbine wake interferes with the pair of staggered downstream turbine wakes and the aligned downstream turbine. For the second type, each turbine wake interacts with the first two downstream turbine wakes but does not show significant interference with the second aligned downstream turbine. For the third type, each turbine wake recovers immediately after passing through the gap of the first two downstream turbines and has little interaction with the second downstream turbine wakes The extracted power density and power efficiency are also studied and compared with aligned wind-turbine arrays.