EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Impact of uncertainty in airfoil characteristics on wind turbine extreme loads

I. Abdallah, A. Natarajan and J.D. Sørensen

Renewable Energy, 2015, vol. 75, issue C, 283-300

Abstract: Wind tunnel test measurements to characterize the static lift and drag coefficients of airfoils used in wind turbine blades are shown to possess large uncertainties, which leads to uncertainties in the aerodynamic loads on the rotor. In this paper a rational stochastic model is proposed to quantify the uncertainty in airfoil static lift and drag coefficients based on field and wind tunnel data, aero-servo-elastic calculations and engineering judgment. The stochastic model is subsequently used to assess the effect of the uncertainty in airfoil static lift and drag coefficients on the prediction of extreme loads and structural reliability of large wind turbines. It is shown that the uncertainty in the static airfoil data has a significant impact on the prediction of extreme loads effects and structural reliability depending on the component, operating conditions (stand-still versus power production) and the correlations of aerodynamic variables along the span of the blades.

Keywords: Wind turbines; Airfoil aerodynamics uncertainty; Extreme wind loads; Probabilistic modeling; Aerodynamic stochastic model; Structural reliability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811400634X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:75:y:2015:i:c:p:283-300

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2014.10.009

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:75:y:2015:i:c:p:283-300