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 spoiler is found to efficiently rearrange the mean flow seen by thick aerofoil: adding lift throughout the positive angles of attack, the drawback is a high drag penalty coupled with high unsteadiness of the aerodynamic forces. The impact of this type of excitation will be quantified further in terms of energy production and fatigue in future work.