Aerodynamic separability in tip speed ratio and separability in wind speed - A comparison

Abstract

From extensive application over a number of years, it has been established that the nonlinear rotor aerodynamics of typical medium and large wind turbines exhibit an effectively global separability property, in other words the aerodynamic torque of the machine can be defined by two independent additive functions. Two versions of the separability of aerodynamic torque for variable speed wind turbines are investigated here; the separated function, related to wind speed, in the first version is only dependent on that variable and not rotor speed and in the second version is only dependent on tip speed ratio. Both provide very good approximations to the aerodynamic torque over extensive neighbourhoods of T0, at least from 0 to 2T0.