David Charles Maniaci

Scaled Wind Farm Technology Facility Overview.

In the past decade wind energy installations have increased exponentially driven by reducing cost from technology innovation and favorable governmental policy. Modern wind turbines are highly efficient, capturing close to the theoretical limit of energy available in the rotor diameter. Therefore, to continue to reduce the cost of wind energy through technology innovation a broadening of scope from individual wind turbines to the complex interaction within a wind farm is needed. Some estimates show that 10 40% of wind energy is lost within a wind farm due to underperformance and turbine-turbine interaction. The US Department of Energy has recently announced an initiative to reshape the national research focus around this priority. DOE, in recognizing a testing facility gap, has commissioned Sandia National Laboratories with the design, construction and operation of a facility to perform research in turbine-turbine interaction and wind plant underperformance. Completed in 2013, the DOE/SNL Scaled Wind Farm Technology Facility has been constructed to perform early-stage high-risk cost-efficient testing and development in the areas of turbine-turbine interaction, wind plant underperformance, wind plant control, advanced rotors, and fundamental studies in aero-elasticity, aero-acoustics and aerodynamics. This paper will cover unique aspects of the construction of the facility to support these objectives, testing performed to create a validated model, and an overview of research projects that will use the facility.

Realistic Leading-Edge Roughness Effects on Airfoil Performance.

Wind farm operators observe power production decay over time, with the exact cause unknown and difficult to quantify. A likely explanation is blade surface roughness, as wind turbines are continuously subjected to environmental hazards. Difficulty arises in understanding and quantifying performance degradation. Historically, wind turbine airfoil families were designed for the lift to be insensitive to roughness by simulating roughness with 2D trip strips. Despite this, roughness is still shown to negatively affect airfoil lift performance. Experiments have also illustrated that random-distributed roughness is not properly simulated by trip strips. Therefore, to better understand how real roughness effects performance, field measurements of turbine-blade roughness were made and simulated on an airfoil section in a wind tunnel. This data will serve to validate and calibrate a one-equation, computational roughness amplification model that interacts with the Langtry-Menter transition model. The observed roughness contains 2D steps, heavy 2D erosion, pitting, insects, and repairs. Of these observations, 2D steps from paint chips were characterized and recreated for this particular wind tunnel entry. The model was tested at chord Reynolds numbers up to 3.6 × 10. Measurements of lift, drag, and pitching moment were made with and without roughness contamination. Transition location was acquired with infrared thermography and a hotfilm array. The paint roughness yields a consistent increase in drag compared to the clean configuration. Numerical simulations are only compared to the clean configuration and match well to lift, drag, and transition for Rec = 1.6 × 10. However, drag is overpredicted at Rec = 3.2 × 10.

Wind Turbine Blade Design for Subscale Testing

Two different inverse design approaches are proposed for developing wind turbine blades for sub-scale wake testing. In the first approach, dimensionless circulation is matched for full scale and sub-scale wind turbine blades for equal shed vorticity in the wake. In the second approach, the normalized normal and tangential force distributions are matched for large scale and small scale wind turbine blades, as these forces determine the wake dynamics and stability. The two approaches are applied for the same target full scale turbine blade, and the shape of the blades are compared. The results show that the two approaches have been successfully implemented, and the designed blades are able to produce the target circulation and target normal and tangential force distributions.

Winglet Design for Wind Turbines Using a Free-Wake Vortex Analysis Method

A winglet was designed for a small-scale, stall regulated wind turbine using a free-wake vortex analysis method. The baseline planar blade (without winglet) was designed by a research group at the University of Waterloo for the purposes of testing the performance gains possible from a winglet. The winglet toe and twist angles were found by exploring a range of possible combinations. The PSU94-097 sailplane winglet airfoil was used as the wind turbine winglet airfoil. The effect of profile drag was only modeled on the winglet and stall was not modeled in the free-wake vortex method, limiting the analysis to only be valid for the range of wind speeds below the wind speed for rated power. The winglet was built as a modification to a small wind turbine, and tested in the small wind turbine testing facility at the University of Waterloo. The experimental test results showed a peak gain of 9.1% in power at a tip-speed ratio of 4.7, falling to a gain of 4% for a broad range of tip-speed ratios. The free-wake vortex model matched the peak performance gain of the experimental results, but predicted a broader range of operating speeds where the winglet showed the higher level of increased power, rather than the small peak region of the experimental results.

Methodology to Determine a Tip-Loss Factor for Highly Loaded Wind Turbines

The commonly observed overprediction of tip loads on wind-turbine blades by classical blade-element momentum theory is investigated by means of an analytical method that determines the exact tip-loss factor for a given blade flow angle. The analytical method is general and can be applied to any higher-fidelity computational method such as free-wake methods or computational fluid dynamics analyses. In this work, the higher-order free-wake method WindDVE is used to compute tip-vortex rollup and wake expansion in the near wake of a highly loaded wind-turbine rotor. The resulting spanwise distributions of the blade flow angle serve as input to the analytical method that is subsequently tested for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory phase 6 rotor by implementing a corrected tip-loss factor into the blade-element code XTurb. It is found that a simple modification can be added to the classical tip-loss factor in blade-element momentum theory that leads to improved prediction of blade tip loads at no additio...

Experimental Measurement and CFD Model Development of Thick Wind Turbine Airfoils with Leading Edge Erosion

Leading edge erosion and roughness accumulation is an issue observed with great variability by wind plant operators, but with little understanding of the effect on wind turbine performance. In wind tunnels, airfoil models are typically tested with standard grit roughness and trip tape to simulate the effects of roughness and erosion observed in field operation, but there is a lack of established relation between field measurements and wind tunnel test conditions. A research collaboration between lab, academic, and industry partners has sought to establish a method to estimate the effect of erosion in wind turbine blades that correlates to roughness and erosion measured in the field. Measurements of roughness and erosion were taken off of operational utility wind turbine blades using a profilometer. The field measurements were statistically reproduced in the wind tunnel on representative tip and midspan airfoils. Simultaneously, a computational model was developed and calibrated to capture the effect of roughness and erosion on airfoil transition and performance characteristics. The results indicate that the effects of field roughness fall between clean airfoil performance and the effects of transition tape. Severe leading edge erosion can cause detrimental performance effects beyond standard roughness. The results also indicate that a heavily eroded wind turbine blade can reduce annual energy production by over 5% for a utility scale wind turbine.

Effects of increasing tip velocity on wind turbine rotor design.

A reduction in cost of energy from wind is anticipated when maximum allowable tip velocity is allowed to increase. Rotor torque decreases as tip velocity increases and rotor size and power rating are held constant. Reduction in rotor torque yields a lighter weight gearbox, a decrease in the turbine cost, and an increase in the capacity for the turbine to deliver cost competitive electricity. The high speed rotor incurs costs attributable to rotor aero-acoustics and system loads. The increased loads of high speed rotors drive the sizing and cost of other components in the system. Rotor, drivetrain, and tower designs at 80 m/s maximum tip velocity and 100 m/s maximum tip velocity are created to quantify these effects. Component costs, annualized energy production, and cost of energy are computed for each design to quantify the change in overall cost of energy resulting from the increase in turbine tip velocity. High fidelity physics based models rather than cost and scaling models are used to perform the work. Results provide a quantitative assessment of anticipated costs and benefits for high speed rotors. Finally, important lessons regarding full system optimization of wind turbines are documented.

Definition of the National Rotor Testbed: An Aeroelastically Relevant Research-Scale Wind Turbine Rotor.

Sandia is designing a set of modern, research-quality blades for use on the V27 turbines at the DOE/SNL SWiFT site at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The new blades will replace OEM blades and will be a publicly available resource for subscale rotor research. Features of the new blades do not represent the optimal design for a V27 rotor, but are determined by aeroelastic scaling of relevant parameters and design drivers from a representative megawatt-scale rotor. Scaling parameters and design drivers are chosen based two factors: 1) retrofit to the existing SWiFT turbines and 2) replicate rotor loads and wake formation of a utility scale turbine to support turbine-turbine interaction research at multiple scales. The blades are expected to provide a publicly available baseline blade design which will enable increased participation in future blade research as well as accelerated hardware manufacture and test for demonstration of innovation. This paper discusses aeroelastic scaling approaches, a rotor design process and a summary of design concepts.

High resolution wind turbine wake measurements with a scanning lidar

High-resolution lidar wake measurements are part of an ongoing field campaign being conducted at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology facility by Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory using a customized scanning lidar from the Technical University of Denmark. One of the primary objectives is to collect experimental data to improve the predictive capability of wind plant computational models to represent the response of the turbine wake to varying inflow conditions and turbine operating states. The present work summarizes the experimental setup and illustrates several wake measurement example cases. The cases focus on demonstrating the impact of the atmospheric conditions on the wake shape and position, and exhibit a sample of the data that has been made public through the Department of Energy Atmosphere to Electrons Data Archive and Portal.

Scanning Lidar Spatial Calibration and Alignment Method for Wind Turbine Wake Characterization

Characterization DTU Orbit (06/12/2018) Scanning Lidar Spatial Calibration and Alignment Method for Wind Turbine Wake Characterization Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conducted a field campaign at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) Facility using a customized scanning lidar from the Technical University of Denmark. The results from this field campaign will support the validation of computational models to predict wake dissipation and wake trajectory offset downstream of a stand-alone wind turbine. In particular, regarding the effect of changes in the atmospheric boundary layer inflow state and turbine yaw offset. A key step in this validation process involves quantifying, and reducing, the uncertainty in the wake measurements. The present work summarizes the process that was used to calibrate the alignment of the lidar in order to reduce this source of uncertainty in the experimental data from the SWiFT field test.