Special issue  

The energy capture of a wind turbine can be improved by completely surrounding it with an airfoil-shaped duct. This paper describes a new modeling strategy used to design an experimental 2.5 m ducted turbine, tested at the University of Waterloo wind turbine test facility. The wind tunnel data validated the predicted performance, indicating that the ducted turbine produced more than twice the power output of a conventional turbine design of the same size. Design implications are also discussed.

The capability of the DLR flow solver to simulate a wind turbine operating in an extreme gust event is presented by propagating the extreme gust through the flow field. The behaviour of the aerodynamic rotor loading and flow characteristics on the rotor blades were evaluated. The long-term perspective is to improve the understanding of the effects of instationary aerodynamics on the wind turbine. This will help to improve wind turbine design methods.

Turbulence is usually assumed to be unmodified by the stagnation occurring in front of a wind turbine rotor. All manufacturers assume this in their dynamic load calculations. If this assumption is not true it might bias the load calculations and the turbines might not be designed optimally. We investigate the assumption with a Doppler lidar measuring forward from the top of the nacelle and find small but systematic changes in the approaching turbulence that depend on the power curve.

Simulations were used to design ducted wind turbines with the objective of either maximizing power per rotor area (PPRA) or maximizing power per duct exit area (PPDA). When PPRA is maximized, any rotor position within the first half of the duct produces approximately the same PPRA. When PPDA is maximized, the optimal position of the rotor is at the rear of duct. In this case, the PPDA exceeds the theoretical power per unit area that can be produced by an open rotor.

We analyze the wake of the Anholt offshore wind farm in Denmark by intercomparing models and measurements. We also look at the effect of the land on the wind farm by intercomparing mesoscale winds and measurements. Annual energy production and capacity factor estimates are performed using different approaches. Lastly, the uncertainty of the wake models is determined by bootstrapping the data; we find that the wake models generally underestimate the wake losses.

The paper discusses load effects on wind turbines operating under misaligned-flow operations, which is part of a strategy to optimize wind-power-plant power production, where upwind turbines can be rotated off the wind axis to redirect their wakes. Analytical simplification, aeroelastic simulations, and field data from an instrumented turbine are compared and interpreted to provide an informed picture on the loads for various components.

This research was conducted with the help of computer models to give argumentation on how the reliability of wind turbine rotor blade structures can be increased using subcomponent testing (SCT) as a supplement to full-scale blade testing (FST). It was found that the use of SCT can significantly reduce the testing time compared to FST while replicating more realistic loading conditions for an outboard blade segment as it occurs in the field.

Several methods have been proposed in the past for extracting the blade performance of wind turbines from simulations. In this work, we present a new method that allows obtaining those data easily not only from simulation results but also from flow measurements. We apply the method to both experiments and simulations of a well-known wind turbine model. The results provide insight into the wind turbine aerodynamics and open up new possibilities for the validation of simulation models.