A 3-year meteorological dataset from an operational wind farm of six 2 MW (megawatt) turbines has been made available. This includes a meteorological mast equipped with sonic anemometers at four different heights and radiometer measurements for atmospheric stability analysis. Simultaneously, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and the scanned geometry of the turbine blades are provided. This database has been made accessible to the research community (https://awit.aeris-data.fr).

This paper provides a comparison of three well-established controllers. The benchmark considered is an airfoil section equipped with local control systems. The objectives are to track the blade lift set by the operator and to test its robustness when a perturbation arises. Differences between controllers are underlined in terms of needed effort and quality of the tracking.

To investigate the impact of turbulence on aerodynamic forces, we first model turbulent kinetic energy decay theoretically using the Taylor length scale and employ this model to create a digital wind tunnel replica for simulating grid-generated turbulence. Experimental validation shows good alignment among theory, simulations, and experiments, paving the way for aerodynamic simulations. Finally, we successfully use the digital replica to obtain force coefficients for a 2D rotor blade section.

A wind turbine blade equipped with root spoilers is analysed using time domain aeroelastic simulations to assess the impact of passive devices on the turbine AEP and lifetime. A novel way to account for aerofoil-generated unsteadiness in the fatigue calculation is proposed and detailed. The outcome shows that spoilers, on average, can increase the AEP of the turbine. However, the structural impacts on the turbine can be severe if not accounted for initially in the turbine design.

The e-TellTale, a new aerodynamic sensor, has been tested in a large wind tunnel at CSTB. This sensor has been designed to detect the flow separation on wind turbine blades, which can cause energy production losses and increased aging of the blades. These wind tunnel tests highlighted the good ability of the e-TellTale to detect the flow separation and the influence of the size and location of the e-TellTale on the flow separation detection.