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Wind turbines

Our Windshape tunable wind tunnel and scaled down wind turbines

Prof. J.W. van Wingerden created a unique laboratory for the testing of small scale wind turbines in a fully controllable wind tunnel. The tunnel itself is based on a

  • a modular active grid of fans produced by Windshape
  • a series of scaled down MoWiTo turbines produced by Univ. of Oldenburg
  • a custom modular enclosure
  • a data acquisition and real time control system produced by dSPACE

The Windshape active grid is composed of 9 by 9 modules, each containing two sets of 9 individually controlled fans. This allows to generate arbitrary wind speed profiles over time and over space, for testing different wind turbine and wind farms control algorithms. The tunnel is constructed using modular compartments in order to confine the flow, and allow for rapid disassembly and configuration. Finally we are using several MoWiTo-0.6 developed at the University of Oldenburg. This three- bladed, horizontal axis turbine has a rotor of 0.58 m and is equipped with controllable generator and pitch actuators. Strain gauges are installed on the turbine tower in order to measure structural loads during experiments. All sensor and control signals are managed by a dSPACE MicroLabBox at a frequency of up to 2 kHz.

Prof. J.W. van Wingerden during the opening of the Windshape lab (left), a view of the tunnel with three turbines (center), Jean Gonzales Silva testing in real time a wind farm control algorithm (right).
Real life visualization of the wake of a turbine controlled using the Helix approach. See Frederik, J.A., Doekemeijer, B.M., Mulders, S.P. and van Wingerden, J.W., 2020. The helix approach: Using dynamic individual pitch control to enhance wake mixing in wind farms. Wind Energy, 23(8), pp.1739-1751.