Multi-criteria Analysis of Heterogeneous Wind Farms under Uncertainty

Abstract

Design and planning of wind energy require the integration of wind farm location and layout wind turbine frame design the aerodynamics of wind turbine blades among many other cost and engineering considerations In the literature most researchers consider only one aspect of the wind farm design while ignoring the rest Since these disciplines are deeply coupled in nature in this research we propose an integrated framework of both wind farm layout optimization and turbine blade design to improve the overall energy transformation efficiency with the minimal noise impact to the neighborhood while considering the aerodynamics of turbine blades the wake effects of wind turbine placement and the propagation of the noise The result is a heterogeneous wind farm composed of different wind turbines of various design and size We also consider the existence of uncertainty from local wind resources The results show that while wake effect can alter the power output of a wind farm the highly varied wind resources could potentially further change the result Various wind farm scenarios are compared in a bi-criteria space with efficiency and noise From our work the decision-makers can select a better wind farm performance from the entire Pareto set based on their priority of power generation efficiency and noise A case study on the west coast of Taiwan is demonstrated to show the usefulness and validity of the proposed framework

Date of Award	2014 Jul 29
Original language	English
Supervisor	Jahau Lewis Chen (Supervisor)