The iteration method for tower height matching in wind farm design

This paper studies the tower height matching problem in wind turbine positioning optimization. Various models are introduced, including the power law wind speed model with height in the wind farm, the linear wake flow model for flat terrain, the particle wake flow model for complex terrain and the power curve model with power control mechanisms. The greedy algorithm is employed to solve the wind turbine positioning optimization at a specified tower height. The optimization objective is to maximize the Turbine-Site Matching Index (TSMI), which includes both the production and the cost of wind farm. Assuming that the optimized layout for each tower height is the same, an iteration method is developed to obtain the approximated optimal height. The convergence of the proposed iteration method is discussed through the mathematical analysis. The proposed iteration method is validated through the numerical cases over both flat terrain and complex terrain. The results indicate that the proposed method can obtain better optimized height in shorter computational time than previous studies. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.