Wind turbine load dynamics in the context of turbulence intermittency

Abstract

The importance of a high-order statistical feature of wind, which is neglected in common wind models, is investigated: non-Gaussian distributed wind velocity increments related to the intermittency of turbulence and their impact on wind turbine dynamics and fatigue loads are the focus. Gaussian and non-Gaussian synthetic wind fields obtained from a continuous-time random walk model are compared and fed to a common aero-servo-elastic model of a wind turbine employing blade element momentum (BEM) aerodynamics. It is discussed why and how the effect of the non-Gaussian increment statistics has to be isolated. This is achieved by assuring that both types feature equivalent probability density functions, spectral properties and coherence, which makes them indistinguishable based on wind characterizations of common design guidelines. Due to limitations in the wind field genesis, idealized spatial correlations are considered. Three examples with idealized; differently sized wind structures are presented. A comparison between the resulting wind turbine loads is made. For the largest wind structure sizes, differences in the fatigue loads between intermittent and Gaussian are observed. These are potentially relevant in a wind turbine certification context. Subsequently, the dependency of this intermittency effect on the field's spatial variation is discussed. Towards very small structured fields, the effect vanishes.