Spacing effects on wind turbine array wake development in the presence of Coriolis

Wind farm footprints are growing in size, developing large scale global farm wakes. The dynamics of the global farm wakes and the interaction with mesoscale atmospheric phenomena, such as Coriolis forces, becomes increasingly important. Current numerical research indicates that global wind farm wake characteristics can be impacted by Coriolis forces and current field research suggests there are spatial and positional influences on wake characteristics. Experimental studies investigated the influence of Coriolis forces on global wind farm wakes, focusing on the impact of varied downstream turbine spacing and turbine row patterns. Two configurations were tested: Aligned and staggered rows. Experiments were performed on the rotating Coriolis platform at Laboratoire des Écoulements Geophysiques et Industriels (LEGI). The objective of the experiments was to isolate Coriolis influence on the global wind farm wakes of two distinct wind farm layouts. Large scale particle image velocimetry was used to measure the experiments. The scaled experiments contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the efficiencies and modelling of large-scale wind farms, as well as the layout and configurations of farm design.