Student(s): Ben Pelson
Project: Aerodynamic Performance of Offshore Wind Turbines | View Poster (PDF)
Major(s): Mechanical Engineering (Aerospace Engineering and Economics minors)
Advisor(s): Aditya Aiyer
Abstract
Driven by the need for cleaner, renewable energy sources, the deployment of onshore and offshore wind farms has grown substantially and become integral to global power production. The power production of a wind farm depends on the velocity at hub height. As upstream turbines extract energy from the freestream wind, they generate wakes that interact with downstream turbines, potentially reducing their power production by 10% to 25%. Induction control has shown promise for minimizing the impact of wake interactions. By adjusting the blade pitch dynamically during the course of operation, the wake impact can be minimized. In this study, we explore both dynamic induction control (referred to as the pulse method) and a recently developed dynamic individual pitch control (referred to as the helix method) developed by Frederik et al. (2020). These methods are contrasted with a baseline case without control. We use OpenFast coupled with the ROSCO Toolbox as our simulation framework and explore the rotor torque, generator power, and fatigue loads for single- and two-turbine configurations under different control strategies. The results are validated with experimental data and Large Eddy Simulation datasets. Future studies will explore a two-turbine model with a wake model for offshore wind turbines including hydrodynamic forces and platform motions.
About Ben Pelson
Ben Pelson is a senior from Virginia majoring in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Aerospace Engineering and Economics. Ben has work experience at NASA Langley and the U.S. Air Force AEDC, where he focused on modeling hypersonic vehicles and high-Mach wind tunnels. In these roles, he developed internal tools in Python and MATLAB and contributed to research acknowledged in academic publications. At Lehigh, Ben has been a part of the ASME executive board, the Formula SAE team, the Chi Phi Fraternity, and is carrying out undergraduate research under Dr. Aditya Aiyer. After graduating in the spring, he will be joining the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a Threat Modeling Engineer.