Researchers have modeled the fluid dynamics of multi-rotor wind turbines, and how they interact in wind farms; the research demonstrates a clear advantage for a turbine model with four rotors.
Researchers have modeled the fluid dynamics of multi-rotor wind turbines, and how they interact in wind farms. The research demonstrates a clear advantage for a turbine model with four rotors.
With their 220-meter diameter, the wind turbines at the future Dogger Bank wind farm in the North Sea are the world’s largest yet. But large, larger, largest is not necessarily the best when it comes to wind turbines.
Researchers from Aarhus University and Durham University in the UK have now modeled the fluid dynamics of multi-rotor wind turbines via high-resolution numerical simulations, and it turns out that wind turbines with four rotors on one foundation have a number of advantages.
A wind turbine harvests energy from the incoming wind, but when the wind passes through the blades of the turbine, a region with lower wind speeds and higher turbulence is created called wind turbine wake. A second wind turbine downstream is affected by this turbulence in several ways. First of all, it produces less energy, and secondly, the structural load is increased.
“In the study, we found that turbulence and currents in the wake of the turbines recover much faster with multi-rotor turbines. This means that, with multi-rotors, a second turbine downstream will produce more energy and will be subjected to less load and stress, because the turbulence is correspondingly smaller,” says Mahdi Abkar, assistant professor at the Department of Engineering, Aarhus University and an expert in flow physics and turbulence.
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