Wind turbine load dynamics in the context of turbulence intermittency

The importance of a high order statistical feature of wind, which is neglected in common wind models, is investigated: Non-Gaussian distributed wind velocity increments related to the intermittency of turbulence and their impact on wind turbines dynamics and fatigue loads are in the focus. Two types of synthetic wind fields obtained from a Continuous-Time-Random Walk model are compared and fed to a common Blade-Element/Momentum theory based aero-servo-elastic wind turbine model. It is discussed why and how the effect of the non-Gaussian increment statistics has to be isolated. This is achieved by assuring that both types feature equivalent probability density functions, spectral properties and coherence, which makes them indistinguishable based on wind characterizations of common design guidelines. Due to limitations in the wind field genesis idealized spatial correlations are considered. Three examples with idealized, differently sized wind structures are presented. A comparison between the resulting wind turbine loads is made. For the largest wind structure sizes differences in the fatigue loads between intermittent and Gaussian are observed. These are potentially relevant in a wind turbine certification context. Subsequently, the dependency of this intermittency effect on the field's spatial variation is discussed. Towards very small structured fields the effect vanishes.