Efficient Wind Farm Micro-siting using Novel Optimization Approaches

Mittal, Prateek and Mitra, Kishalay (2020) Efficient Wind Farm Micro-siting using Novel Optimization Approaches. PhD thesis, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad.

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Abstract

The growing environmental concerns and the rapid depletion of conventional sources of energy have arisen the need for alternative sources to satisfy the increasing energy needs. Amidst other alternative energy sources such as solar, hydro, geothermal etc., wind energy turns out to be the most promising source in this regard. Generally, wind energy is harnessed using group of wind turbines in a farm, which converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. However, designing such wind farm layouts, also known as wind farm layout optimization (WFLO), is an extremely challenging task. The actual difficulties lie in handling different kinds of practical constraints while attaining multiple objectives at the time of determining the optimal locations and numbers of wind turbines inside a wind farm. In this work, using a widely used wake model, several novel algorithms encompassing the classes of evolutionary, classical and combinatorial techniques have been utilized to find the optimal solution of different single and multi-objective formulations while addressing the literature gaps. The objective and importance of this work along with an exhaustive literature survey on different methodologies developed so far to solve the WFLO problem are presented in chapter 1. Utilizing the merits of both evolutionary and classical gradient-based methods, a single objective hybrid methodology is proposed first to maximize the power production of a wind farm (chapter 2). Next, variable and space decomposition based approaches are adopted to tackle the combinatorial complexities of the problem (chapters 3 and 4). These developments provide an improvement of ~75% in power production upon validating with the most explored benchmark case study. Furthermore, the impacts of noise propagation and the presence of practical constraints are studied on the wind farm design (chapter 5 and 6). Upon applying to a realistic case study adopted from literature, decrease of ~83% in power production can be observed owing to the presence of practical constraints as compared to the case when they were not present. Next, considering the uncertain nature of wind flow inside a wind farm, a robust optimization methodology has been proposed to determine the robust wind farm layouts that remain insensitive to all changing wind conditions and can provide minimum guaranteed performance out of a wind farm (chapter 7). Finally, the mathematical equations of wind model involving logical conditions have been converted into explicit forms of algebraic equations to enable them to be solved by classical solvers of proven repute available under GAMS® environment to solve the WFLO problem (chapter 8). Finally, the results are summarized and the scopes of future works are highlighted in chapter 9.

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