Project description
Positioning wind turbines for improved energy production
To meet the growing need for environmentally friendly energy sources, nations and organisations around the world are searching for ways to produce as much energy as possible at lower costs. This makes wind energy popular but its performance hinges on location and positioning. The EU-funded zEPHYR project aims to create a platform that will allow for better consideration of where wind turbines should be deployed for maximum energy production. It plans to do that by implementing advanced meso/microscale atmospheric models and data on the impact of real terrain and local atmospheric models in the search for optimal wind turbine locations.
Objective
The rise of a low-carbon society, compatible with economic growth and environmental sustainability, is pending on a number of technological evolutions and breakthroughs. In that line, the role played by wind energy is deemed to increase further in the next decades. The development of performant wind farms is pending upon the performance of each turbine composing the wind farm, and on the optimal harvesting of the local wind resources. A wind park performance is nowadays predicted assuming standard profiles of mean incoming velocity, turbulence intensities and scales, etc. corresponding to standard terrain topographies and atmospheric conditions.
One main limitation of such standards is that the assumed flow and turbulence properties were established to fit databases gathered on a limited number of locations, which are by definition not representative of the quite various terrain configurations nor local micro-meteorological situations that can be met in practice. This is a concern for complex terrains and is furthermore hampering the implementation of wind turbines in urban environments, which constitutes nevertheless an important component of future environmentally-friendly Smart Cities thanks to the favorable local flow accelerations, pressure build-up, canyon effects, etc. offered by an urban canopy.
The ambition of this multi-disciplinary training platform is the development and application of advanced meso/microscale atmospheric models and the assessment of the impact of real terrain and local atmospheric effects on the predicted aerodynamic performance, structural dynamics and noise emissions. Obviously, human factors become a critical issue when considering implementing wind turbines in densely populated urban environments. The inter-dependencies between those factors (visual vs. acoustic effects, age or occupation, etc.), which complicate further the analysis of the motivations for a community to endorse or reject a new project, will be addressed as well.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringurban engineeringsmart cities
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyplanetary sciencesplanetary geology
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energywind power
- social sciencespsychologyergonomics
Keywords
Programme(s)
Coordinator
1640 Sint-Genesius-Rode
Belgium