Aerodynamic analysis of wind farms

Abstract

Wind energy is one of the most promising types of renewable energy and is successfully integrated in our lives. Wind turbines were used in the past centuries, but utilizing the wind energy in a large amount started with the installation of thousands of wind turbines in California in the late 1980s ("History of wind power", 2019). Although the wind energy became popular there are problems causing the wind energy usage to lag behind the wind range of traditional fossil fuel usage. That is, wind turbine operation is not continuous as required because of the failures that cause unscheduled downtime during their intended design lifetime. These failures mainly include the component failures, especially the rotor blades. Rotor blades are ones of the most critical components, what is being verified by the statistics showing 3800 incidents of blade failure each year out of an estimated 700 000 blades operating globally (Dvorak, 2019). The reasons and technical information about such structural failures of rotor blades are not discussed in the media and rarely reported in academic literature because of the unavailability of the technical data due to commercial confidentiality. Meanwhile, this problem became the topic of a great interest for many researchers all around the world.