Effect of blade contamination on power production of wind turbines

Date

2022-06-01

Author

Özgen, Serkan
Sarıbel, Eda Bahar
Yaman, Ali Rıza

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Wind turbines suffer from considerable power losses because of contamination ontheir blades, that can be due to erosion, wear, smog, insect, sand and dust particle impact.Blade contamination, its effects on the flows over the wind turbine blades and consequentpower production losses form the main focus of the present study. These effects are mainlydue to increased roughness on the blades leading to earlier laminar-turbulent transition andconsequently, thicker boundary-layers on the blades. Early laminar-turbulent transition leadsto a larger part of the flow over a blade being turbulent, thus increasing skin friction drag.Thicker boundary-layer on a blade results in blade profile being effectively modified, renderingthe flow over the blade depart from ideal. In the present study, the effects of blade contaminationon power output of contaminated wind turbine blades is investigated numerically using an inhousecomputational tool. Blade Element Momentum Method (BEM) combined with the PanelMethod is used to calculate the local velocity and angle of attack at the blade sections, togetherwith the power produced by the blade. Trajectories of particles causing contamination arecalculated using Lagrangian approach, also yielding the impingement pattern of the particleson the blade surface, i.e. particle collection efficiency distribution. The effects of roughness onthe boundary-layer flow are investigated by using an Integral Boundary-Layer Method, whichyields the characteristics of the boundary-layer, i.e. laminar-turbulent transition location,increased skin-friction and thickening of the boundary-layer. The blade shape is modifieddue contamination thickness, the local height of which is assumed to be proportional to thelocal collection efficiency. Also, the roughness height distribution used in the boundary-layercalculations is assumed to be equal to the contamination thickness distribution on the blades.Power production and consequent losses of wind turbines with contaminated wind turbine bladesare studied with respect to variations in particle size, wind speed and roughness height.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/107639

Collections

Department of Aerospace Engineering, Article