scholarly journals Wind Turbines with Truncated Blades May Be a Possibility for Dense Wind Farms

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 1810 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shyuan Cheng ◽  
Yaqing Jin ◽  
Leonardo P. Chamorro

We experimentally explored the impact of a wind turbine with truncated blades on the power output and wake recovery, and its effects within 2 × 3 arrays of standard units. The blades of the truncated turbine covered a fraction of the outer region of the rotor span and replaced with a zero-lift structure around the hub, where aerodynamic torque is comparatively low. This way, the incoming flow around the hub may be used as a mixing enhancement mechanism and, consequently, to reduce the flow deficit in the wake. Particle image velocimetry was used to characterize the incoming flow and wake of various truncated turbines with a variety of blade length ratios L / R = 0.6 , 0.7, and 1, where L is the length of the working section of the blade of radius R. Power output was obtained at high frequency in each of the truncated turbines, and also at downwind units within 2 × 3 arrays with streamwise spacing of Δ x / d T = 4 , 5, and 6, with d T being the turbine diameter. Results show that the enhanced flow around the axis of the rotor induced large-scale instability and mixing that led to substantial power enhancement of wind turbines placed 4 d T downwind of the L / R = 0.6 truncated units; this additional power is still relevant at 6 d T . Overall, the competing factors defined by the expected power reduction of truncated turbines due to the decrease in the effective blade length, the need for reduced components of the truncated units, and enhanced power output of downwind standard turbines suggest a techno-economic optimization study for potential implementation.

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Tobin ◽  
Adam Lavely ◽  
Sven Schmitz ◽  
Leonardo P. Chamorro

The dependence of temporal correlations in the power output of wind-turbine pairs on atmospheric stability is explored using theoretical arguments and wind-farm large-eddy simulations. For this purpose, a range of five distinct stability regimes, ranging from weakly stable to moderately convective, were investigated with the same aligned wind-farm layout used among simulations. The coherence spectrum between turbine pairs in each simulation was compared to theoretical predictions. We found with high statistical significance (p < 0.01) that higher levels of atmospheric instability lead to higher coherence between turbines, with wake motions reducing correlations up to 40%. This is attributed to higher dominance of atmospheric motions over wakes in strongly unstable flows. Good agreement resulted with the use of an empirical model for wake-added turbulence to predict the variation of turbine power coherence with ambient turbulence intensity (R 2 = 0.82), though other empirical relations may be applicable. It was shown that improperly accounting for turbine–turbine correlations can substantially impact power variance estimates on the order of a factor of 4.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 4291
Author(s):  
Paxis Marques João Roque ◽  
Shyama Pada Chowdhury ◽  
Zhongjie Huan

District of Namaacha in Maputo Province of Mozambique presents a high wind potential, with an average wind speed of around 7.5 m/s and huge open fields that are favourable to the installation of wind farms. However, in order to make better use of the wind potential, it is necessary to evaluate the operating conditions of the turbines and guide the independent power producers (IPPs) on how to efficiently use wind power. The investigation of the wind farm operating conditions is justified by the fact that the implementation of wind power systems is quite expensive, and therefore, it is imperative to find alternatives to reduce power losses and improve energy production. Taking into account the power needs in Mozambique, this project applied hybrid optimisation of multiple energy resources (HOMER) to size the capacity of the wind farm and the number of turbines that guarantee an adequate supply of power. Moreover, considering the topographic conditions of the site and the operational parameters of the turbines, the system advisor model (SAM) was applied to evaluate the performance of the Vestas V82-1.65 horizontal axis turbines and the system’s power output as a result of the wake effect. For any wind farm, it is evident that wind turbines’ wake effects significantly reduce the performance of wind farms. The paper seeks to design and examine the proper layout for practical placements of wind generators. Firstly, a survey on the Namaacha’s electricity demand was carried out in order to obtain the district’s daily load profile required to size the wind farm’s capacity. Secondly, with the previous knowledge that the operation of wind farms is affected by wake losses, different wake effect models applied by SAM were examined and the Eddy–Viscosity model was selected to perform the analysis. Three distinct layouts result from SAM optimisation, and the best one is recommended for wind turbines installation for maximising wind to energy generation. Although it is understood that the wake effect occurs on any wind farm, it is observed that wake losses can be minimised through the proper design of the wind generators’ placement layout. Therefore, any wind farm project should, from its layout, examine the optimal wind farm arrangement, which will depend on the wind speed, wind direction, turbine hub height, and other topographical characteristics of the area. In that context, considering the topographic and climate features of Mozambique, the study brings novelty in the way wind farms should be placed in the district and wake losses minimised. The study is based on a real assumption that the project can be implemented in the district, and thus, considering the wind farm’s capacity, the district’s energy needs could be met. The optimal transversal and longitudinal distances between turbines recommended are 8Do and 10Do, respectively, arranged according to layout 1, with wake losses of about 1.7%, land utilisation of about 6.46 Km2, and power output estimated at 71.844 GWh per year.


Author(s):  
I. Janajreh ◽  
C. Ghenai

Large scale wind turbines and wind farms continue to evolve mounting 94.1GW of the electrical grid capacity in 2007 and expected to reach 160.0GW in 2010 according to World Wind Energy Association. They commence to play a vital role in the quest for renewable and sustainable energy. They are impressive structures of human responsiveness to, and awareness of, the depleting fossil fuel resources. Early generation wind turbines (windmills) were used as kinetic energy transformers and today generate 1/5 of the Denmark’s electricity and planned to double the current German grid capacity by reaching 12.5% by year 2010. Wind energy is plentiful (72 TW is estimated to be commercially viable) and clean while their intensive capital costs and maintenance fees still bar their widespread deployment in the developing world. Additionally, there are technological challenges in the rotor operating characteristics, fatigue load, and noise in meeting reliability and safety standards. Newer inventions, e.g., downstream wind turbines and flapping rotor blades, are sought to absorb a larger portion of the cost attributable to unrestrained lower cost yaw mechanisms, reduction in the moving parts, and noise reduction thereby reducing maintenance. In this work, numerical analysis of the downstream wind turbine blade is conducted. In particular, the interaction between the tower and the rotor passage is investigated. Circular cross sectional tower and aerofoil shapes are considered in a staggered configuration and under cross-stream motion. The resulting blade static pressure and aerodynamic forces are investigated at different incident wind angles and wind speeds. Comparison of the flow field results against the conventional upstream wind turbine is also conducted. The wind flow is considered to be transient, incompressible, viscous Navier-Stokes and turbulent. The k-ε model is utilized as the turbulence closure. The passage of the rotor blade is governed by ALE and is represented numerically as a sliding mesh against the upstream fixed tower domain. Both the blade and tower cross sections are padded with a boundary layer mesh to accurately capture the viscous forces while several levels of refinement were implemented throughout the domain to assess and avoid the mesh dependence.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Klose ◽  
Junkan Wang ◽  
Albert Ku

Abstract In the past, most of the offshore wind farms have been installed in European countries. In contrast to offshore wind projects in European waters, it became clear that the impact from earthquakes is expected to be one of the major design drivers for the wind turbines and their support structures in other areas of the world. This topic is of high importance in offshore markets in the Asian Pacific region like China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea as well as parts of the United States. So far, seismic design for wind turbines is not described in large details in existing wind energy standards while local as well as international offshore oil & gas standards do not consider the specifics of modern wind turbines. In 2019, DNV GL started a Joint Industry Project (JIP) called “ACE -Alleviating Cyclone and Earthquake challenges for wind farms”. Based on the project results, a Recommended Practice (RP) for seismic design of wind turbines and their support structures will be developed. It will supplement existing standards like DNVGL-ST-0126, DNVGL-ST-0437 and the IEC 61400 series. This paper addresses the area of seismic load calculation and the details of combining earthquake impact with other environmental loads. Different options of analysis, particularly time-domain simulations with integrated models or submodelling techniques using superelements will be presented. Seismic ground motions using a uniform profile or depth-varying input profile are discussed. Finally, the seismic load design return period is addressed.


Author(s):  
Farhad Namdari ◽  
Fatemeh Soleimani ◽  
Esmaeel Rokrok

<p><em>Environmental concerns along with the increasing demand on electrical power, have led to power generation of renewable sources like wind. Connecting wind turbines in large scale powers with transmission network makes new challenges like the impact of these renewable sources on power system protection. This paper studies the impact of fault resistance and its location on voltage and current fundamental frequencies of faulted lines connected to DFIG based wind farms and it will be demonstrated that because of the large differences between these frequencies, impedance measuring of distance relays is inefficient. Hence in these power systems using conventional impedance measurements is not suitable anymore and new impedance measuring approaches are required in distance relays.</em></p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 02011
Author(s):  
Cristian-Gabriel Alionte ◽  
Daniel-Constantin Comeaga

The importance of renewable energy and especially of eolian systems is growing. For this reason, we propose the investigation of an important pollutant - the noise, which has become so important that European Commission and European Parliament introduced Directive 2002/49/CE relating to the assessment and management of environmental noise. So far, priority has been given to very large-scale systems connected to national energy systems, wind farms whose highly variable output power could be regulated by large power systems. Nowadays, with the development of small storage capacities, it is feasible to install small power wind turbines in cities of up to 10,000 inhabitants too. As a case study, we propose a simulation for a rural locality where individual wind units could be used. This specific case study is interesting because it provides a new perspective of the impact of noise on the quality of life when the use of this type of system is implemented on a large scale. This option, of distributed and small power wind turbine, can be implemented in the future as an alternative or an adding to the common systems.


Machines ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi

Pitch angle control is the most common means of adjusting the torque of wind turbines. The verification of its correct function and the optimization of its control are therefore very important for improving the efficiency of wind kinetic energy conversion. On these grounds, this work is devoted to studying the impact of pitch misalignment on wind turbine power production. A test case wind farm sited onshore, featuring five multi-megawatt wind turbines, was studied. On one wind turbine on the farm, a maximum pitch imbalance between the blades of 4.5 ° was detected; therefore, there was an intervention for recalibration. Operational data were available for assessing production improvement after the intervention. Due to the non-stationary conditions to which wind turbines are subjected, this is generally a non-trivial problem. In this work, a general method was formulated for studying this kind of problem: it is based on the study, before and after the upgrade, of the residuals between the measured power output and a reliable model of the power output itself. A careful formulation of the model is therefore crucial: in this work, an automatic feature selection algorithm based on stepwise multivariate regression was adopted, and it allows identification of the most meaningful input variables for a multivariate linear model whose target is the power of the wind turbine whose pitch has been recalibrated. This method can be useful, in general, for the study of wind turbine power upgrades, which have been recently spreading in the wind energy industry, and for the monitoring of wind turbine performances. For the test case of interest, the power of the recalibrated wind turbine is modeled as a linear function of the active and reactive power of the nearby wind turbines, and it is estimated that, after the intervention, the pitch recalibration provided a 5.5% improvement in the power production below rated power. Wind turbine practitioners, in general, should pay considerable attention to the pitch imbalance, because it increases loads and affects the residue lifetime; in particular, the results of this study indicate that severe pitch misalignment can heavily impact power production.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 1668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianghai Wu ◽  
Tongguang Wang ◽  
Long Wang ◽  
Ning Zhao

This article presents a framework to integrate and optimize the design of large-scale wind turbines. Annual energy production, load analysis, the structural design of components and the wind farm operation model are coupled to perform a system-level nonlinear optimization. As well as the commonly used design objective levelized cost of energy (LCoE), key metrics of engineering economics such as net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR) and the discounted payback time (DPT) are calculated and used as design objectives, respectively. The results show that IRR and DPT have the same effect as LCoE since they all lead to minimization of the ratio of the capital expenditure to the energy production. Meanwhile, the optimization for NPV tends to maximize the margin between incomes and costs. These two types of economic metrics provide the minimal blade length and maximal blade length of an optimal blade for a target wind turbine at a given wind farm. The turbine properties with respect to the blade length and tower height are also examined. The blade obtained with economic optimization objectives has a much larger relative thickness and smaller chord distributions than that obtained for high aerodynamic performance design. Furthermore, the use of cost control objectives in optimization is crucial in improving the economic efficiency of wind turbines and sacrificing some aerodynamic performance can bring significant reductions in design loads and turbine costs.


2013 ◽  
Vol 805-806 ◽  
pp. 393-396
Author(s):  
Zhen Yu Xu ◽  
Zhen Qiao ◽  
Qian He ◽  
Xu Zhang ◽  
Jing Qi Su

With the penetration of wind energy is becoming higher and higher in power grid, it is very important to investigate the impact of wind generations on small signal stability. In this paper, a complete small signal model of wind turbine with direct-drive permanent magnet generator is built to study the impact of large-scale wind farms on the small signal stability of power system. By means of simulation and eigenvalue analysis, an actual power system is investigated, and the damping characteristic of power grid under different wind power penetration is discussed.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document