Site-Specific Design Optimization of 1.5–2.0 MW Wind Turbines

2001 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 296-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Fuglsang ◽  
Kenneth Thomsen

A method is presented for site-specific design of wind turbines where cost of energy is minimized. A numerical optimization algorithm was used together with an aeroelastic load prediction code and a cost model. The wind climate was modeled in detail including simulated turbulence. Response time series were calculated for relevant load cases, and lifetime equivalent fatigue loads were derived. For the fatigue loads, an intelligent sensitivity analysis was used to reduce computational costs. Extreme loads were derived from statistical response calculations of the Davenport type. A comparison of a 1.5 MW stall regulated wind turbine in normal onshore flat terrain and in an offshore wind farm showed a potential increase in energy production of 28% for the offshore wind farm, but also significant increases in most fatigue loads and in cost of energy. Overall design variables were optimized for both sites. Compared to an onshore optimization, the offshore optimization increased swept area and rated power whereas hub height was reduced. Cost of energy from manufacture and installation for the offshore site was reduced by 10.6% to 4.6¢. This reduction makes offshore wind power competitive compared with today’s onshore wind turbines. The presented study was made for one wind turbine concept only, and many of the involved sub models were based on simplified assumptions. Thus there is a need for further studies of these models.

Author(s):  
Bryan Nelson ◽  
Yann Quéméner

This study evaluated, by time-domain simulations, the fatigue lives of several jacket support structures for 4 MW wind turbines distributed throughout an offshore wind farm off Taiwan’s west coast. An in-house RANS-based wind farm analysis tool, WiFa3D, has been developed to determine the effects of the wind turbine wake behaviour on the flow fields through wind farm clusters. To reduce computational cost, WiFa3D employs actuator disk models to simulate the body forces imposed on the flow field by the target wind turbines, where the actuator disk is defined by the swept region of the rotor in space, and a body force distribution representing the aerodynamic characteristics of the rotor is assigned within this virtual disk. Simulations were performed for a range of environmental conditions, which were then combined with preliminary site survey metocean data to produce a long-term statistical environment. The short-term environmental loads on the wind turbine rotors were calculated by an unsteady blade element momentum (BEM) model of the target 4 MW wind turbines. The fatigue assessment of the jacket support structure was then conducted by applying the Rainflow Counting scheme on the hot spot stresses variations, as read-out from Finite Element results, and by employing appropriate SN curves. The fatigue lives of several wind turbine support structures taken at various locations in the wind farm showed significant variations with the preliminary design condition that assumed a single wind turbine without wake disturbance from other units.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1014
Author(s):  
Janna Kristina Seifert ◽  
Martin Kraft ◽  
Martin Kühn ◽  
Laura J. Lukassen

Abstract. Space–time correlations of power output fluctuations of wind turbine pairs provide information on the flow conditions within a wind farm and the interactions of wind turbines. Such information can play an essential role in controlling wind turbines and short-term load or power forecasting. However, the challenges of analysing correlations of power output fluctuations in a wind farm are the highly varying flow conditions. Here, we present an approach to investigate space–time correlations of power output fluctuations of streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs based on high-resolution supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. The proposed approach overcomes the challenge of spatially variable and temporally variable flow conditions within the wind farm. We analyse the influences of the different statistics of the power output of wind turbines on the correlations of power output fluctuations based on 8 months of measurements from an offshore wind farm with 80 wind turbines. First, we assess the effect of the wind direction on the correlations of power output fluctuations of wind turbine pairs. We show that the correlations are highest for the streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs and decrease when the mean wind direction changes its angle to be more perpendicular to the pair. Further, we show that the correlations for streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs depend on the location of the wind turbines within the wind farm and on their inflow conditions (free stream or wake). Our primary result is that the standard deviations of the power output fluctuations and the normalised power difference of the wind turbines in a pair can characterise the correlations of power output fluctuations of streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs. Further, we show that clustering can be used to identify different correlation curves. For this, we employ the data-driven k-means clustering algorithm to cluster the standard deviations of the power output fluctuations of the wind turbines and the normalised power difference of the wind turbines in a pair. Thereby, wind turbine pairs with similar power output fluctuation correlations are clustered independently from their location. With this, we account for the highly variable flow conditions inside a wind farm, which unpredictably influence the correlations.


Author(s):  
Z. Guédé ◽  
B. Bigourdan ◽  
A. Rouhan ◽  
J. Goyet ◽  
P. Renard

In the present paper, a framework for Risk-Based Inspection planning is set up for a park of wind turbines taking into account the fact that only a sample of wind turbines is inspected at the scheduled inspection dates. A risk-based strategy is proposed to select the wind turbines to inspect, which significantly reduces the computational effort required by a crude application of Risk-Based Inspection analysis. The proposed framework is illustrated on a simple example of a wind farm where the failure of a wind turbine is driven by the fatigue crack of one of its critical structural detail.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1461-1484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Long Wang ◽  
Guoping Chen ◽  
Tongguang Wang ◽  
Jiufa Cao

AbstractWith lower turbulence and less rigorous restrictions on noise levels, offshore wind farms provide favourable conditions for the development of high-tip-speed wind turbines. In this study, the multi-objective optimization is presented for a 5MW wind turbine design and the effects of high tip speed on power output, cost and noise are analysed. In order to improve the convergence and efficiency of optimization, a novel type of gradient-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is proposed based on uniform decomposition and differential evolution. Optimization examples of the wind turbines indicate that the new algorithm can obtain uniformly distributed optimal solutions and this algorithm outperforms the conventional evolutionary algorithms in convergence and optimization efficiency. For the 5MW wind turbines designed, increasing the tip speed can greatly reduce the cost of energy (COE). When the tip speed increases from 80m/s to 100m/s, under the same annual energy production, the COE decreases by 3.2% in a class I wind farm and by 5.1% in a class III one, respectively, while the sound pressure level increases by a maximum of 4.4dB with the class III wind farm case.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 1549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rongyong Zhao ◽  
Daheng Dong ◽  
Cuiling Li ◽  
Steven Liu ◽  
Hao Zhang ◽  
...  

Increasing maintenance costs will hinder the expansion of the wind power industry in the coming decades. Training personnel, field maintenance, and frequent boat or helicopter visits to wind turbines (WTs) is becoming a large cost. One reason for this cost is the routine turbine inspection repair and other stochastic maintenance necessitated by increasingly unbalanced figure loads and unequal turbine fatigue distribution in large-scale offshore wind farms (OWFs). In order to solve the problems of unbalanced fatigue loads and unequal turbine fatigue distribution, thereby cutting the maintenance cost, this study analyzes the disadvantages of conventional turbine fatigue definitions. We propose an improved fatigue definition that simultaneously considers the mean wind speed, wind wake turbulence, and electric power generation. Further, based on timed automata theory, a power dispatch approach is proposed to balance the fatigue loads on turbines in a wind farm. A control topology is constructed to describe the logical states of the wind farm main controller (WFMC) in an offshore wind farm. With this novel power control approach, the WFMC can re-dispatch the reference power to the wind turbines according to their cumulative fatigue value and the real wind conditions around the individual turbines in every power dispatch time interval. A workflow is also designed for the control approach implementation. Finally, to validate this proposed approach, wind data from the Horns Rev offshore wind farm in Denmark are used for a numerical simulation. All the simulation results with 3D and 2D figures illustrate that this approach is feasible to balance the loads on an offshore wind farm. Some significant implications are that this novel approach can cut the maintenance cost and also prolong the service life of OWFs.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna K. Seifert ◽  
Martin Kraft ◽  
Martin Kühn ◽  
Laura J. Lukassen

Abstract. The correlation of power output fluctuations of wind turbines in free field are investigated, taking into account the challenge of varying correlation states due to variable flow and wind turbine conditions within the wind farm. Based on eight months of 1 Hz SCADA data, measured at an offshore wind farm with 80 wind turbines, the influence of different parameters on the correlation of power output fluctuations is analysed. It is found that the correlation of power output fluctuations of wind turbines depends on the location of the wind turbines within the wind farm as well as the inflow conditions (free-stream or wake). Wind direction investigations show that the correlation is highest for streamwise aligned pairs and decreases towards spanwise pairs. Most importantly, the highly variable measurement data in a free-field wind farm has considerable influence on the identification of different correlation states. To account for that, the clustering algorithm k-means is used to group wind turbine pairs with similar correlations. The main outcome is that next to the location of a wind turbine pair in the wind farm the standard deviation in their power output and their power differences are suitable parameters to describe the correlation of power output fluctuations.


2001 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 304-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Thomsen ◽  
P. Fuglsang ◽  
G. Schepers

The potential for site specific design of MW sized wind turbines is quantified by comparing design loads for wind turbines installed at a range of different sites. The sites comprise on-shore normal flat terrain stand-alone conditions and wind farm conditions together with offshore and mountainous complex terrain wind farms. The design loads are established for a 1 MW active stall regulated wind turbine with the aeroelastic code HAWC. The load analysis is limited to fatigue loads. We do not consider ultimate loads in this paper. The results illustrate the differences in design wind conditions for different sites and the related differences in design loads for the 1 MW wind turbine. Based on the difference in the design loads, the potentials for site specific design of the wind turbine main components are identified. The results show that the variation in aerodynamically driven loads and energy production can be more than 50% between the different sites. It is concluded that site specific design is feasible for some of the main components. In particular, site specific changes are feasible for the tower, nacelle components, and for the blades in the flapwise direction. It is also evaluated whether the IEC61400-1 standard [see Ref. [4], International Electrochemical Commission (1999)] is representative for the different sites. A comparison with design loads based on the IEC61400-1 illustrates that the six different sites can be described by the standard design classes.


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