Anemometer Positioning Optimization for Flow Field Calculation in Wind Farm

In a wind farm, the wind data of the anemometers are used to evaluate the local wind resource. The position of the anemometer in a wind farm influences the wind resource evaluation significantly. In this paper, the position optimization of the anemometer related to flow field simulation of a wind farm is studied. The computational fluid dynamics method is introduced for airflow simulation. Based on the similarity of the flow field and the wind data of a single anemometer in the wind farm, a residual correction method is introduced to determine the boundary wind speeds and the flow field of the wind farm. Subsequently, a performance index is proposed through analyzing the characteristics of the residual correction method, acting as the optimization principle for anemometer positioning. The effectiveness of the performance index is tested by a case on a randomly generated terrain and a case with measured wind data in a real wind farm. The results indicate that the best anemometer position after optimization is not the one with highest elevation. Furthermore, the wind data of the optimized anemometer position can help to improve the numerical flow field results as well as saving much computational cost compared to the one with highest elevation. It is suggested that the proposed performance index can be used as the guidance for the anemometer positioning when designing a wind farm. (c) 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.