Aerodynamic Pressure And Flow Visualization Measurement From A Rotating Wind Turbine Blade

Aerodynamic, load, flow-visualization, and inflow measurements were taken on a downwind horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT). A video camera mounted on the rotor recorded video images of tufts attached to the low-pressure side of the blade. Strain gages, mounted every 10% of the blade's span, provided load and pressure measurements. Pressure taps at 32 chordwise positions recorded pressuredistributions. Wind inflow was measured via a vertical-plane array of anemometers located 10 m upwind. The objectives of the test were to address whether airfoil pressure distributions measured on a rotating blade differed from those measured in the wind tunnel, if radial flow near or in the boundary layer of the airfoil affected pressure distributions, if dynamic stall could result in increaseddynamic loads, and if the location of the separation boundary measured on the rotating blade agreed with that measured in two-dimensional flow in the wind tunnel.

Lists citations with abstracts for aerospace related reports obtained from world wide sources and announces documents that have recently been entered into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Database.

Wind turbine aerodynamics is one of the central subjects of wind turbine technology. To reduce the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), the size of a single wind turbine has been increased to 12 MW at present, with further increases expected in the near future. Big wind turbines and their associated wind farms have many advantages but also challenges. The typical effects are mainly related to the increase in Reynolds number and blade flexibility. This Special Issue is a collection of 21 important research works addressing the aerodynamic challenges appearing in such developments. The 21 research papers cover a wide range of problems related to wind turbine aerodynamics, which includes atmospheric turbulent flow modeling, wind turbine flow modeling, wind turbine design, wind turbine control, wind farm flow modeling in complex terrain, wind turbine noise modeling, vertical axis wind turbine, and offshore wind energy. Readers from all over the globe are expected to greatly benefit from this Special Issue collection regarding their own work and the goal of enabling the technological development of new environmentally friendly and cost-effective wind energy systems in order to reach the target of 100% energy use from renewable sources, worldwide, by 2050

Wind turbine generators commonly operate in either a fixed-pitch or variable-pitch mode. In variable-pitch mode the angle of the blade is changed as the wind speed varies to maintain near optimum airfoil angle of attack and to regulate peak power. The more common fixed-pitch rotors do not change pitch angle to regulate peak power. Instead the blade is allowed to stall aerodynamically. This approach results in rapid relief of loads caused by gusts and is more reliable and cost effective. However, the designer must accurately understand the rotating-blade stall; behavior of the airfoil in order to predict turbine loads. To understand such stall behavior a test program that uses specially designed instrumentation has been conducted by the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI). A microprocessor-controlled measurement system has been designed and built to make accurate measurements of low pressures on a rotating wind turbine blade.

The book introduces the fundamentals of fluid-mechanics, momentum theories, vortex theories and vortex methods necessary for the study of rotors aerodynamics and wind-turbines aerodynamics in particular. Rotor theories are presented in a great level of details at the beginning of the book. These theories include: the blade element theory, the Kutta-Joukowski theory, the momentum theory and the blade element momentum method. A part of the book is dedicated to the description and implementation of vortex methods. The remaining of the book focuses on the study of wind turbine aerodynamics using vortex-theory analyses or vortex-methods. Examples of vortex-theory applications are: optimal rotor design, tip-loss corrections, yaw-models and dynamic inflow models. Historical derivations and recent extensions of the models are presented. The cylindrical vortex model is another example of a simple analytical vortex model presented in this book. This model leads to the development of different BEM models and it is also used to provide the analytical velocity field upstream of a turbine or a wind farm under aligned or yawed conditions. Different applications of numerical vortex methods are presented. Numerical methods are used for instance to investigate the influence of a wind turbine on the incoming turbulence. Sheared inflows and aero-elastic simulations are investigated using vortex methods for the first time. Many analytical flows are derived in details: vortex rings, vortex cylinders, Hill's vortex, vortex blobs etc. They are used throughout the book to devise simple rotor models or to validate the implementation of numerical methods. Several Matlab programs are provided to ease some of the most complex implementations.