Aerodynamics of Wind Turbines

Aerodynamics of Wind Turbines
Martin Hansen
190 pages

Open: Aerodynamics of Wind Turbines
Premium Membership Minimum Required

Introduction

The force of the wind can be very strong, as can be seen after the passage of a hurricane or a typhoon. Historically, people have harnessed this force peacefully, its most important usage probably being the propulsion of ships using sails before the invention of the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. Wind has also been used in windmills to grind grain or to pump water for irrigation or, as in The Netherlands, to prevent the ocean from flooding low-lying land. At the beginning of the twentieth century electricity came into use and windmills gradually became wind turbines as the rotor was connected to an electric generator.

The first electrical grids consisted of low-voltage DC cables with high losses. Electricity therefore had to be generated close to the site of use. On farms, small wind turbines were ideal for this purpose and in Denmark Poul la Cour, who was among the first to connect a windmill to a generator, gave a course for ‘agricultural electricians’. An example of La Cour’s great foresight was that he installed in his school one of the first wind tunnels in the world in order to investigate rotor aerodynamics. Gradually, however, diesel engines and steam turbines took over the production of electricity and only during the two world wars, when the supply of fuel was scarce, did wind power flourish again.

However, even after the Second World War, the development of more efficient wind turbines was still pursued in several countries such as Germany, the US, France, the UK and Denmark. In Denmark, this work was undertaken by Johannes Juul, who was an employee in the utility company SEAS and a former student of la Cour. In the mid 1950s Juul introduced what was later called the Danish concept by constructing the famous Gedser turbine, which had an upwind three-bladed, stall regulated rotor, connected to an AC asynchronous generator running with almost constant speed. With the oil crisis in 1973, wind turbines suddenly became interesting again for many countries that wanted to be less dependent on oil imports; many national research programmes were initiated to investigate the possibilities of utilizing wind energy. Large non-commercial prototypes were built to evaluate the economics of wind produced electricity and to measure the loads on big wind turbines. Since the oil crisis, commercial wind turbines have gradually become an important industry with an annual turnover in the 1990s of more than a billion US dollars per year. Since then this figure has increased by approximately 20 per cent a year.

TOC

1 General Introduction to Wind Turbines 1
2 2-D Aerodynamics 7
3 3-D Aerodynamics 18
4 1-D Momentum Theory for an Ideal Wind Turbine 27
5 Shrouded Rotors 41
6 The Classical Blade Element Momentum Method 45
7 Control/Regulation and Safety Systems 63
8 Optimization 78
9 Unsteady BEM Method 85
10 Introduction to Loads and Structures 103
11 Beam Theory for the Wind Turbine Blade 107
12 Dynamic Structural Model of a Wind Turbine 125
13 Sources of Loads on a Wind Turbine 139
14 Wind Simulation 147
15 Fatigue 157
Appendix A: Basic Equations in Fluid Mechanics