EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION, OPTIMIZATION AND PERFORMANCE PREDICTION OF WIND TURBINE(S) FOR COMPLEX TERRAIN

Aamir Naseer, Anurag Gour, Pankaj Jain, Mukesh Pandey

Abstract: Man has been doing business with Winds since a very long period of time; the wind power has been used as long as humans have put sails into the wind. For more than two millennia wind powered machines have ground grain and pumped water. This affiliation of man and wind is inexhaustible which makes Wind Energy a very significant and rapidly developing renewable energy sources in all over the world. But when it comes to electricity generation by harnessing the wind energy, indeed, it requires more technicality, since it requires a great need for correct and reliable installations of new wind turbines in a more optimized way for smooth operations and electricity productions, and for that, a precise knowledge of wind energy regime is a prerequisite for the efficient and optimized extraction of power from the wind. The main purpose of this paper is to present, in brief, wind potential and to perform an investigation on wind flow characteristics at RGPV Hill Top. In this work the recorded time series wind data for a period of five months as from july-2013 to November-2013 at the heights of 20 meters and 40 meters was fetched and analyzed for studying the observed wind climate, which was recorded by the NRG Symphonie Data logger wind mast installed at Energy Park, RGPV campus with an fixed averaging interval of 10 minutes, the analyzed data which was worked upon comprises of wind speed data in meter per second and its direction of flow in degrees. As a part of this work, the Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program (WAsP) was employed to predict average mean-wind speeds for all directions for some desired sites. The influences of roughness of the terrain, for the area were also taken into consideration, followed by the vector map of the area. These data were analyzed using WAsP software and regional wind climate of the area was determined, leading to a wind resource map of the whole site, providing crucial details which helped in selecting the proposed turbine sites. Also, the AEP for the two already installed turbines was calculated.

Keywords: WAsP, AEP, Wind resource, Wind Rose

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0303024