Sharif Digital Repository

Excitation Controlled Synchronous Generator-based Wind Turbine (ECSG WT) is a recently proposed Wind Turbine (WT) scheme that has not been fully investigated in detail. This paper intends to analyze the performance of the ECSG WT scheme and compare it with those of two mainstream WT schemes based on electrically excited synchronous generator, i.e., VSC-based full converter WT and diode bridge rectifier-based WT equipped with boost converter on its Direct Current (DC) link. The objective of this comparison is to demonstrate great potentials of ECSG WT to be considered in the wind industry. To do so, two successful Wind Turbine (WT) schemes in the market that are structurally close to ECSG WT... 

The blade element momentum (BEM) theory is based on the actuator disc (AD) model, which is probably the oldest analytical tool for analysing rotor performance. The BEM codes have very short processing times and high reliability. The problems of the analytical codes are well known to the researchers: the impossibility of describing inside the one-dimensional code the three-dimensional (3D) radial flows along the span-wise direction. In this work, the authors show how the 3D centrifugal pumping affects the BEM calculations of a wind turbine rotor. Actually to ascertain the accuracy of the analytical codes, the results are compared with rotor performance, blade loads and particle image... 

Variable speed wind turbines are widely used in the modern power industry. These turbines that are usually driven by doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) contain two groups of controlling variables; mechanical variables like pitch angle and electrical variables like rotor voltage. During the turbine operation, with variable wind velocity, power must be managed in two regimes; power optimisation and power limitation. In the current research, initially a non-linear simulation, based on the general wind turbine dynamic model is presented. Then, the desired controllers for both pitch angle and generator voltage components are constructed. After designing the controller, in order to... 

In this study a multi-objective genetic algorithm is utilized to obtain a Pareto optimal set of solutions for geometrical characteristics of airfoil sections for 10-meter blades of a horizontal axis wind turbine. The performance of the airfoil sections during the process of energy conversion is evaluated deploying a 2D incompressible unsteady CFD solver and the second law analysis. Artificial neural networks are trained employing CFD obtained data sets to represent objective functions in an algorithm which implements exergetic performance and integrity characteristics as optimization objectives. The results show that utilizing the second law approach along with Pareto optimality concept... 

The study deals with the design and optimization of external and internal geometry of micro-wind turbines blades. A specified objective function which consists of the power coefficient and the starting time was defined and the genetic algorithm optimization technique in conjunction with the blade-element momentum theory was adopted to find the geometry of the blades including the distributions of the chord, the twist angle and also the shell thickness. Moreover, the allowable stress of the blades was considered as a constraint to the objective function. Results show that a reasonable compromise is achievable such that the starting time of the blades reduces noticeably in return for a small... 

The present study numerically investigates the feasibility of using multiple dielectric barrier discharge (multi-DBD) plasma actuators as a novel approach for active flow control over a large horizontal axis wind turbine rotor. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory 5 MW offshore wind turbine is used as the baseline case. This turbine uses pitch control system to adjust the generated power above its rated wind speeds, but at lower speeds, this system remains inactive. In this paper, the operational condition speed is considered lower than the rated wind speed. The mathematical electro-static model is implemented to simulate the effects of plasma actuator on the external flow and the... 

Limited fossil resources, daily increasing rate of demand for energy and the environmental pollution fact have made people revert to renewable sources of energy as a solution. One type of renewable energy is offshore wind energy which has high potential without any sound and visual noises. Recently, a lot of researchers have carried out on the issue of offshore wind turbine. Because of incapability of most of software programs to simulate gyroscopic effect of rotating rotors, in this articles a significant effort has been made to fabricate and test an offshore wind turbine under different rotor rotation velocities and different heading angle of wind so as to obtain the effects of these... 

Due to the increased flexibility of modern multi-megawatt wind turbine structures, more advanced analyses are needed to investigate the effects of geometric nonlinearities originating from large blade deformations under operational loads. The main objective of this paper is to study the related dynamics and the aeroelastic effects of these nonlinearities by using a multi-flexible-body aeroelastic model of an entire three-bladed wind turbine assembly instead of a more conventional single-blade model. A geometrically-exact beam formulation is employed to model the rotating blades connected to the wind turbine tower tip via hub and nacelle components; and the revolute joint constraint is... 

This paper presents a new method for protecting the variable speed wind turbines in switching between different regions. With the objective of power maximization, the controller is applied in all regions. Since usually different methods and algorithms are used in different regions for controlling the wind turbines, smooth transition between these controllers is necessary for the safety and protection of turbine parts and structure. A two degree of freedom mechanical model is used and the simulations are performed and verified by FAST. The turbine is controlled by a rotor angular speed controller in the second region and an inverse dynamic pitch controller in the third region. The transient... 

Wind turbine generators (WTG) can participate in system frequency regulation via virtual inertial controllers (VIC). In the presence of frequency disturbances, VIC temporarily regulates the WTG power output forcing it to release/absorb kinetic energy into/from the grid. With increasing penetration of WTGs in power systems, grid operators require these generators to provide frequency regulation services; however, kinetic energy release/absorption can destabilize WTGs. Hence, to address these issues, a new large-perturbation nonlinear WTG model is proposed in this paper, based on the WTG internal response that is used to tune typical VICs. Novel worst case and optimal VIC tuning approaches are... 

A series of experiments were carried out to study the unsteady wakes behind an oscillating airfoil. The airfoil is a section of a wind turbine blade oscillating in pitch about the quarter chord axis at various reduced frequencies, oscillation amplitude and mean angles of attack. Real time velocity profiles were obtained using total and static pressure at 35 vertically aligned points behind the airfoil via two similar rakes. The rakes were located at a distance of 1.5 chord length behind the model. The results show great influence of oscillation amplitude and reduced frequency on the wake velocity profiles. Copyright © 2007 by ASME  

Extensive low speed wind-tunnel tests were conducted to study the unsteady aerodynamic behaviour of an airfoil sinusoidally oscillating in plunge. The experiments involved measuring the surface pressure distribution over a range of amplitudes, H = ±5 to ±15cm. In addition, steady state data were acquired and were used to furnish a baseline for further analysis and comparison. The model was oscillated with a constant reduced frequency, k = 0.058, at three mean angles of attack of 0°, 10° and 18°. The unsteady aerodynamic loads were calculated from the surface pressure measurements, 64 ports, along the chord for both upper and lower surfaces of the model. The plunging displacements were... 

Over recent years, the concept of waste heat recovery from the generators of wind turbines for driving a thermal-driven desalination system was introduced, and its advantages were highlighted. However, any selection of a bottoming thermal-driven desalination system among different existing technologies should be taken under consideration before making an ultimate recommendation. Unfortunately, no comprehensive comparison is available in the literature to compare the performance as well as the cost aspects of using the waste thermal energy of the generator of a wind turbine for desalinating seawater, comparing them with those of a layout where the power of the wind turbine is directly... 

Reducing the renewable energy costs is necessary for the competition with the fossil energies and control strategies have great impact on the efficiency of wind machines. In the wind turbine industry, a practical approach is to maximize the energy capture of a wind machine by optimizing the power coefficient in the under-rated situations. In this paper, with the main objective of maximizing the energy capture in the second region, four different control strategies are compared in the presence of uncertainties. The proposed control methods are compared based on their power capture and robustness against probable uncertainties in the structural and environmental parameters. A two-mass... 

In this paper, the aeroelastic analysis of a large scale wind turbine rotor is performed with the aim of studying transient performance of turbine in extreme wind conditions, such as wind gusts and rapid yaw changes. The effect of the presence and/or lack of blade pitch control system on output power, rotor thrust, and blade deformation in sudden change of wind speed are investigated. The NREL 5 MW offshore wind turbine is used as the baseline case. In this regard, the modal approach is implemented for modeling the flexible blade structure with tension, bending and torsion degrees of freedom. The unsteady vortex lattice method is employed to obtain the aerodynamic loads. Moreover, the... 

Roadmapping, a tool of strategic planning, visualize where and how an organization will be in the future. Visualization of strategic programs assists people in the organization to understand the strategy which is a key for implementing strategy successfully. A generic roadmap is included of three main layers such as; market, product and technology. Decision making in each layer are done separately because of the nature of each layer. Therefore, decisions in roadmapping can be done with different tools. Whiles, decisions in each layer of the roadmap cannot be done without considering the upper or lower layer decisions. In this study we propose Fuzzy PROMETHEE method for integrating decisions...