[Instrument Network - R&D News] Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Excellent Research Group Project "Study on Multiscale Problems in Nonlinear Mechanics", the Institute of Mechanics has made progress in the active control of turbulence in wind farms and proposed a self-consistent wake model for evaluating the effectiveness of control measures. This work, titled "Self-consistent model for active control of wind turbine wakes", was published in the journal Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Turbulence is one of the major challenges in wind energy science identified by Science. Active flow control at the wind farm scale is a core issue for next-generation wind power technology. Wind turbine wake models form the foundation of active flow control. Currently available wind turbine wake models, including steady wake models and dynamic wake meandering models, are unable to accurately evaluate the wake turbulence response under active control.

To address this challenge, the research team proposed a self-consistent model for the active control of wind turbine wakes. They established a theoretical framework that couples three key phenomena: dynamic wake meandering, turbulent random fluctuations, and time-averaged wake expansion. This framework enables the quantitative prediction of large-scale coherent structures and time-averaged fields of wakes under active control, making it the first wake model capable of predicting the effectiveness of active control measures. Validation results show that the model’s prediction accuracy is comparable to that of large eddy simulation (LES), while its computational efficiency is significantly improved—the computation time is reduced from thousands of core-hours to several minutes. This model is expected to provide an efficient tool for the design, evaluation, and optimization of active control strategies for wind farm turbulence, supporting the improvement of wind energy utilization efficiency and the innovation of wind power technology.

Associate Researcher Zhao Bin Li is the first author of the paper, and Researcher Xiaolei Yang is the corresponding author. This research was supported by the NSFC Excellent Research Group "Study on Multiscale Problems in Nonlinear Mechanics" and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB0620102), among other funding sources.