Project description
Measuring load performance, predicting production of wind turbines
Wind turbines are growing bigger and taller. And the bigger they get, the more the blade tips are affected by turbulent atmospheric flow features. Measuring load performance and predicting production is important for engineers to make optimisations necessary to further improve performance. In this context, the EU-funded FLOW project will develop new prediction methods for production statistics and load performance of modern GW-scale and 400-metre tall offshore and onshore wind energy systems. It will improve the knowledge of atmospheric flow physics and the interplay between wind farm (microscale) and large-scale (mesoscale) processes such as: wind farm global blockage, farm farm interaction, and topographic and wake-added turbulence in complex terrain. FLOW will develop and validate simulation tools based on these principles.
Objective
The objective of the FLOW project is to develop new and innovative prediction methods for production statistics and load performance of modern GW-scale and 400-metre tall offshore and onshore wind energy systems. Our project will develop more accurate methods as regards the present state of the art (SOTA) and with high confidence, thereby reducing uncertainties, increasing productivity and grid stability, lowering Levelised Cost of Energy (LCoE), while establishing an open-source knowledge hub that will benefit the entire renewable energy sector and enable joint optimization between developers and OEMs. To reach these ambitions, FLOW will improve the knowledge of atmospheric flow physics and the interplay between wind farm (microscale) and large-scale (mesoscale) processes such as: wind farm global blockage, farm-farm interaction, and topographic and wake-added turbulence in complex terrain. Based on these principles, FLOW will develop and validate simulation tools that can be readily adopted by industry to lower economic uncertainties and enhance system reliability and power production, with wide economic and societal impacts. The proposed modelling framework will make extensive use of public experimental datasets to validate and train models within a FAIR data hub. The New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) database is the foundation to grow this innovative open-source ecosystem that links experimental data, flow models, and validation datasets for benchmarking and training. Industry adoption will be facilitated through a computationally efficient modular framework that allows scalability in a production environment. FLOW’s industrial partners, comprised of VESTAS, SGRE, GE, and EDF, will verify compliance with operational processes and test the framework using private datasets to extend the validation range and demonstrate the added value of our results at a wide European scale.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energywind power
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationssimulation software
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
2800 Kongens Lyngby
Denmark