Using digital filtering techniques as an aid in wind turbine data analysis

摘要

Research involving very large sets of digital data is often difficult due to the enormity of the database. In the case of a wind turbine operating under varying environmental conditions, determining which data are representative of the blade aerodynamics and which are due to transient flow ingestion effects or errors in instrumentation, operation, and data collection is of primary concern to researchers. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado collected extensive data on a downwind horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) during a turbine test project called the Combined Experiment. A principal objective of this experiment was to provide a means to predict HAWT aerodynamic, mechanical, and electrical operational loads based upon analytical models of aerodynamic performance related to blade design and inflow conditions. In a collaborative effort with the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a team of researchers has evolved and utilized various digital filtering techniques in analyzing the data from the Combined Experiment. A preliminary analysis of the data set was performed to determine how to best approach the data. The reduced data set emphasized selection of inflow conditions such that the aerodynamic data could be compared directly to wind tunnel data obtained for the same airfoil design as used for the HAWT's blades. It will be shown that this reduced data set has yielded valid, reproducible results that a simple averaging technique or a random selection approach cannot achieve. These findings provide a stable baseline against which operational HAWT data can be compared.