Annual Report 2016 - Mechanical Engineering

Wind Energy

Wind energy technology

Prof. Dr.

Carlo L. Bottasso

The Wind Energy Institute (WEI) concentrates its research activities on

four highly interconnected thrust areas: simulation, testing, control and

design. The institute works both on basic scientific and application-orien-

ted problems, often in close collaboration with industry. Areas of specific

expertise embrace all main relevant scientific disciplines, including aero-

dynamics, structures, dynamics, materials, controls and electrical aspects.

www.wind.mw.tum.de carlo.bottasso@tum.de

Phone +49.89.289.16681

Contact

The international conference ‘The Science

of Making Torque from Wind’ (TORQUE

2016) was organized by WEI at the

Garching TUM Campus on October 5-7,

2016, under the auspices of the European

Academy of Wind Energy (EAWE). More

than 530 researchers from 29 different

countries discussed the latest advance-

ments in wind energy science. The con-

ference, which grew by more than 60%

with respect to the 2014 event, saw the

presentation of over 140 oral papers and

almost 170 posters, which have all been

published in the open-access Journal of

Physics – Conference Series. A special

issue of selected papers is currently under

preparation for publication in Wind Energy

Science, the new EAWE flagship journal,

of which Prof. Bottasso is one of the

founding Chief Editors.

Scaled Wind Turbine and Wind Farm Testing

WEI has developed a scaled experi-

mental facility for the simulation of wind

turbines and wind farms in a boundary

layer wind tunnel. This unique facility

enables the conduction of experiments in

aeroservoelasticity, the study of wakes,

machine-to-machine interactions, and

wind farm control for power maximization

and load mitigation. The facility is highly

instrumented, allowing for the collection

of a wide range of high quality data,

both regarding the flow conditions and

the response of the machines. Such

data can be used for the verification of

performance of control strategies, as well

as the validation of computational tools.

The experimental setup is highly flexible,

supporting different machine configura-

tions and operational scenarios, as well as

the testing of different control algorithms

used on board the individual wind turbines

or the whole wind farm.

In early 2016, WEI conducted the first-ever

experimental demonstration of close-loop

wake-redirection control. In this wind

tunnel test, a cluster of three wind turbines

was operated in a coordinated manner,

leading to an improvement in their overall

Scaled wind farm in a boundary

layer wind tunnel

LiDAR visualization of the flow

without (left) and with (right) wind

farm control