Projecte assignat
Títol: Efficient assessment of ice growth on wind turbine performance
Director/a: GONZÁLEZ HORCAS, SERGIO
Departament: FIS
Títol: Efficient assessment of ice growth on wind turbine performance
Data inici oferta: 18-06-2024 Data finalització oferta: 18-02-2025
Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
MU AEROSPACE S&T 21
| Tipus: Individual | |
| Lloc de realització: EETAC | |
| Segon director/a (UPC): ROJAS GREGORIO, JOSEP IGNASI | |
| Paraules clau: | |
| Ice growth, Aerodynamics, Aeroelasticity, Rotors, Wind turbines, Atmospheric boundary layer | |
| Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats: | |
| Icing on wind turbine blades significantly impacts the efficiency of machines operating in cold climate regions. The growth of ice can be seen as a degradation of the original aerodynamic shape used in the design cycle. This affects annual energy production, which is degraded, and the accuracy of short-term power forecasts. Frequent severe icing could reduce the annual energy production of wind farms by tens of percent, directly translating to substantial economic and environmental losses.
The proposed research aims to achieve two main objectives. Firstly, a simple numerical methodology will be proposed to represent the effects of ice growth on the blade shape. Two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations will be employed to estimate the degradation of the aerodynamic coefficients of the various airfoils composing the blade, and extensive sensitivity studies will be conducted to gain confidence in the model, including experimental validations. Secondly, the research will estimate the impact of such degradation on the performance of representative wind turbine rotors. To that end, aeroelastic rotor simulations relying on efficient approaches such as the blade element momentum theory (BEM) will be employed. Comparing the set of polars computed for the baseline configuration with those obtained by assessing the airfoils accounting for ice growth will allow for studying the relative decrease in power production. The study could eventually also estimate the effects of ice growth on the incoming wind speed profile due to the generation of ice/snow in the surroundings of the wind turbine location and its effects on ground roughness. The proposed scientific methodology includes: conducting a comprehensive literature review on ice growth on wind turbine blades, generating an analytical model to estimate the effects of ice growth on wind turbine blades, generating CFD models and exploiting and extrapolating data to obtain the polars, and setting up a rotor model using BEM, capable of accessing the sets of polar data computed in this work. |
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| Orientació a l'estudiant: | |
| The student is expected to have a solid background in fixed-wing aerodynamics and some experience with using CFD packages (at an industrial or academic level). The student should also have a strong foundation in programming, preferably in MATLAB or Python, as scripting will be a crucial part of the project execution. Finally, the willingness to adapt to a terminal-based workflow is essential for this project, as the numerical simulations will mainly be executed in a Unix environment.
Supervision will take the form of weekly virtual meetings. These meetings will typically occur bilaterally between the main supervisor and the student, while the co-supervisor will be invited upon request for critical steps and results analysis. A considerable workload is expected for this thesis project due to the demanding nature of the computational methods involved, so gradual progress is expected every week. |
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| Requereix activitats hardware: No | |
| Requereix activitats software: No | |
| Horari d'atenció a estudiants per a l'assignació de projecte: |
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