**4. Conclusions**

The work carried out in this paper showed the e ffects of yaw misalignment on loads for a generic turbine. The active misalignment of turbines against the inflow direction is a tool to increase overall power output of the park as well as to decrease overall non-torque loads. However, the turbine that is misaligned itself will not necessarily benefit from this control scheme. A change in non-torque loads is to be expected. The influence of a yaw misalignment over a total timespan of 20 years is examined and analysed in this study. It is found that the di fferences in loads induced by yaw misalignments aren't symmetrical but dependent on the direction of the inflow. A clockwise rotation of the turbine, as seen from above, leads to smaller maximum loads as well as smaller average load cycle amplitudes for the horizontal in-plane force and the moment around the y-axis. If the turbine is rotated counter clockwise it shows the mentioned above e ffects for the moment around the z-axis up until 5◦. Beyond that the e ffect seems to be reversed. It can be stated that wake steering does not necessarily have a negative impact on each drive train load, but the influence is to be taken into account. A basic understanding of the load behaviour due to wake steering is achieved. It is absolutely necessary to consider the non-torque-loads when implementing such a control scheme rather than solely focussing on the power output. In further studies, the load distributions calculated in this work can be merged with distributions of yaw misalignments due to wake steering to predict the load spectrum under real conditions. In addition, a cost function for weighting the various loads could be propagated to determine a preferential rotational direction when wake steering is necessary.

**Author Contributions:** M.C. and B.R. conceived and designed the experiments; M.C. performed the experiments; M.C. and B.R. analyzed the data; R.S. and G.J. contributed materials and analysis tools; M.C. wrote the paper.

**Funding:** This research was funded by VGB PowerTech.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
