Wind Gust Generation for Wind Turbine Testing via Numerical Methods

The modelling of gust generation by an array of oscillating vanes at Delft's University of Technology Open Jet Facility is proposed. Focus is placed on identifying relevant in-field gusts that horizontal axis wind turbines are exposed to and reproduction via numerical methods in the wind tunnel setting. A computationally efficient model is...

Cascaded incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion for MAV disturbance rejection

This paper presents the cascaded integration of Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) for attitude control and INDI for position control of micro air vehicles. Significant improvements over a traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller are demonstrated in an experiment where the quadrotor flies in and out of a 10 m...

Extreme gusts and their role in wind turbine design

Wind turbines are the largest rotating machines on the planet, operating in some of the most remote and hostile areas. During a lifespan of several decades, they have to withstand storms, waves, and gusts (and preferably produce electricity in the process). Yet, designers cannot make them too strong. Every additional kilogram of mass has to be...

Assessing the Severity of Wind Gusts with Lidar

Lidars have gained a lot of popularity in the field of wind energy, partly because of their potential to be used for wind turbine control. By scanning the oncoming wind field, any threats such as gusts can be detected early and high loads can be avoided by taking preventive actions. Unfortunately, lidars suffer from some inherent weaknesses that...

Importance sampling of severe wind gusts

An important problem that arises during the design of wind turbines is estimating extreme loads with sufficient accuracy. This is especially difficult during iterative design phases when computational resources are scarce. Over the years, many methods have been proposed to extrapolate extreme load distributions from relatively short time series...