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Wind Turbines and Wind Farms Performance Analysis Through Numerical and Experimental Methods, 2nd Edition

A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "A3: Wind, Wave and Tidal Energy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 September 2025 | Viewed by 1739

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Guest Editor
Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, Via Branze 38, 25123 Brescia, Italy
Interests: wind turbines; condition monitoring; fault diagnosis; non-stationary machinery; control and monitoring; vibrations; applied statistics; numerical modelling; mechanical systems dynamics
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Greater exploitation of renewable energy is, at present, at the centre of the global policy agenda. In this context, wind turbines represent an extremely promising technology. On the one hand, new installations with large rotors are growing at a remarkable rate, necessitating precise evaluation of their actual capacity. On the other hand, a vast fraction of the wind turbines operating in Europe are presently reaching the end of their expected lifetime, and thus, judicious decisions will need to be taken regarding their repowering, decommissioning and so on.

While wind turbine and wind farm performance research is increasingly relevant, this objective poses several scientific and technological challenges. Wind turbines are complex machines subjected to nonstationary operation conditions, and in real-world plants it is impractical to monitor all the environmental conditions on which the extracted power depends.

Considering this premise, this Special Issue will present high-quality contributions covering all aspects of wind farms and wind turbine performance.

Dr. Davide Astolfi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • wind turbine power curves
  • SCADA data analysis
  • diagnosis of wind turbine under-performance and faults
  • wind turbine and wind farm wakes and turbulence
  • wind farm blockage
  • jets and wind turbine performance
  • wind power forecast
  • wind turbine life cycle assessment
  • wind turbine ageing and end-of-life issues
  • wind turbine technology
  • wind tunnel testing
  • LiDAR and anemometry
  • wind farm control and wake steering
  • yaw and pitch control
  • wind turbines in complex terrain
  • computational fluid dynamics large wind turbines
  • offshore wind farms
  • floating wind turbines
  • microwind turbines

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Related Special Issue

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

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33 pages, 16560 KiB  
Article
TLP-Supported NREL 5MW Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Tower Vibration Reduction Under Aligned and Misaligned Wind-Wave Excitations
by Paweł Martynowicz, Piotr Ślimak and Georgios M. Katsaounis
Energies 2025, 18(8), 2092; https://doi.org/10.3390/en18082092 - 18 Apr 2025
Viewed by 178
Abstract
This paper presents a numerical study on the structural vibrations of a TLP-supported NREL 5MW wind turbine equipped with a tuned vibration absorber (TVA) in the nacelle. The analysis was focused on tower bending deflections and was conducted using a reference OpenFAST V3.5.3 [...] Read more.
This paper presents a numerical study on the structural vibrations of a TLP-supported NREL 5MW wind turbine equipped with a tuned vibration absorber (TVA) in the nacelle. The analysis was focused on tower bending deflections and was conducted using a reference OpenFAST V3.5.3 dedicated wind turbine modelling software and a finite element simulation framework based on Comsol Multiphysics V6.3 which was newly developed for this study. The obtained four-degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) tower bending model was transferred using modal decomposition to the MATLAB/Simulink R2020b environment, where a 2-DOF TLP surge/sway model and a bidirectional (2-DOF) TVA model were embedded. The wind field was approximated by a Weibull distribution of velocities (8.86 m/s mean, 4.63 m/s standard deviation). It was combined with the wave actions simulated using a Bretschneider spectrum with a significant height of 2.5 m and a peak period of 8.1 s. The TVA model used was either the standard NREL reference 20-ton passive TVA, a 10-ton passive, or a 10-ton controlled TVA (the latter two tuned to the tower’s first bending mode). The controlled TVA utilised a magnetorheological (MR) damper, either operating independently (forming a semi-active MR-TVA) or simultaneously with a force actuator, forming, in this case, a hybrid H-MR-TVA. Both aligned and 45°/90° misaligned wind–wave excitations were examined to investigate the performance of a 10-ton real-time controlled (H-)MR-TVA operating with less working space. In aligned conditions, the semi-active and hybrid MR-TVA solutions demonstrated superior tower vibration mitigation, reducing maximum tower deflections by 11.2% compared to the reference TVA and by 14.9% with regard to the structure without TVA. The reduction in root-mean-square deflection reached up to 4.2%/2.9%, respectively, for the critical along-the-waves direction, while the TVA stroke reduction reached 18.6%. For misaligned excitations, the tower deflection was reduced by 4.3%/4.8% concerning the reference 20-ton TVA, while the stroke was reduced by 22.2%/34.4% (for 45°/90° misalignment, respectively). It is concluded that the implementation of the 10-ton real-time controlled (H-)MR-TVA is a promising alternative to the reference 20-ton passive TVA regarding tower deflection minimisation and TVA stroke reduction for the critical along-the-waves direction. The current research results may be used to design a full-scale semi-active or hybrid TVA system serving a TLP-supported floating offshore wind turbine structure. Full article
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Review

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34 pages, 890 KiB  
Review
Wind Turbine Static Errors Related to Yaw, Pitch or Anemometer Apparatus: Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Related Performance Assessment
by Davide Astolfi, Silvia Iuliano, Antony Vasile, Marco Pasetti, Salvatore Dello Iacono and Alfredo Vaccaro
Energies 2024, 17(24), 6381; https://doi.org/10.3390/en17246381 - 18 Dec 2024
Viewed by 974
Abstract
The optimization of the efficiency of wind turbine systems is a fundamental task, from the perspective of a growing share of electricity produced from wind. Despite this, and given the complex multivariate dependence of the power of wind turbines on environmental conditions and [...] Read more.
The optimization of the efficiency of wind turbine systems is a fundamental task, from the perspective of a growing share of electricity produced from wind. Despite this, and given the complex multivariate dependence of the power of wind turbines on environmental conditions and working parameters, the literature is lacking studies specifically devoted to a careful characterization of wind farm performance. In particular, in the literature, it is overlooked that there are several types of faults which have similar manifestations and that can be defined as static errors. This kind of error manifests as a static bias occurring from a certain time onward, which can affect the anemometer, the absolute or relative pitch of the blades, or the yaw system. Static or systematic errors typically do not cause the functional failure of the wind turbine system, but they deserve attention due to the fact that they cause power production loss throughout the operation time. Based on this, the first objective of the present study is a critical review of the recent papers devoted to three types of wind turbine static errors: anemometer bias, static yaw error, and pitch misalignment. As a result, a comprehensive viewpoint, enhancing the state of the art in the literature, is developed in this study. Given that the use of data collected by Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems has, up to now, been prevailing for the diagnosis of systematic errors compared to the use of further specific sensors, particular attention in the present study is thus devoted to the discussion of the phenomena which can be observable through SCADA data analysis. Based on this, finally, a rigorous work flow is formulated for detecting static errors and discriminating among them through SCADA data analysis. Nevertheless, methods based on additional information sources (like further sensors or meteorological data) are also discussed. An important aspect of this study is that, for each considered type of systematic error, some previously unpublished results based on real-world SCADA data are reported in order to corroborate the proposed framework. Summarizing, then, the present is the first paper which considers and discusses several types of wind turbine static errors in a unified viewpoint, correctly interprets apparently controversial results collected in the literature, and finally provides guidelines for the diagnosis of this kind of error and for the quantification of the performance drop associated with their presence. Full article
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