A2e

Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e) is a new, multi-year, multi-stakeholder U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development initiative tasked with improving wind plant performance and mitigating risk and uncertainty to achieve substantial reduction in the cost of wind energy production.

The A2e strategic vision will enable a new generation of wind plant technology, in which smart wind plants are designed to achieve optimized performance stemming from more complete knowledge of the inflow wind resource and complex flow through the wind plant.

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Project: Unsteady Aerodynamics Experiment Phase VI NREL-NASA Ames Wind Tunnel Experiment

The Unsteady Aerodynamics Experiment (UAE) was undertaken to acquire research-grade wind turbine aerodynamics measurements capable of expanding physical comprehension, improving predictive models, and advancing turbine technology and performance. Initiated in 1987 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) National Wind Technology Center (NWTC), the UAE evolved through five phases of field experiments during 1987 through 1998.[1-3] Concurrently, analogous wind turbine field experiments aimed at the same objectives were pursued at several laboratories in Europe and Asia.[4,5] Together, these field experiments succeeded in developing procedures and instrumentation for acquiring research-grade measurements in the field test environment and generally confirmed that turbine blades produced flow fields that were highly three-dimensional, strongly separated, and predominantly unsteady.

However, crucial details of the turbine blade flow fields remained obscure, overwhelmed by the temporal and spatial disparities imposed by turbulent atmospheric inflows. To isolate the key blade and rotor fluid mechanics details, atmospheric inflow anomalies needed to be eliminated. Thus, plans were launched simultaneously in the United States and Europe to carry out research-grade turbine aerodynamics experiments in the largest U.S. and EU wind tunnels. Documented and archived in the DAP UAE6 database, the NREL UAE Phase VI experiment was conducted in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 80 ft x 120 ft wind tunnel at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.[6] The EU Model rotor EXperiment In COntrolled conditions (MEXICO) experiment was carried out in the German-Dutch Wind Tunnels (DNW) Large Low Speed Facility (LLF), located near Marknesse in The Netherlands.[7]

The DAP UAE6 database contains the measurements acquired via experiments in the NASA Ames 80 ft x 120 ft during 2000. The UAE Phase VI wind tunnel experiment objectives were to: 1) acquire research grade aerodynamic and structural measurements 2) on a subscale wind turbine geometrically/dynamically similar to full scale, 3) operating in a controlled, low-turbulence inflow environment.

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Dataset Overview

Sequence M: Transition Fixed (P)

Test sequence M used an upwind, rigid turbine with a 0° cone angle. The wind speed ranged from 5 m/s to 15 m/s. Yaw angles ranged from 0° to 90°. The blade tip pitch was 3°. The rotor rotated at 72 RPM. Blade pressure measurements were collected. The five-hole probes were removed and the plugs were installed. Plastic tape 0.03-mm-thick was used to smooth the interface between the plugs and the blade. The teeter dampers were replaced with rigid links, and these two channels were flagged as not applicable by setting the measured values in the data file to –99999.99 Nm. The teeter link load cell was pre-tensioned to 40,000 N. During post-processing, the probe channels were set to read –99999.99. Zigzag tape was installed near the leading edge of the instrumented blade on both the upper and lower surfaces as described in Appendix K. In addition to the standard 30-second campaigns, yaw sweeps were done at 7 m/s and 10 m/s. These 90-second campaigns were collected while the yaw drive rotated the turbine 90° at a rate of 1°/s. The file names for these campaigns use the letter designation, followed by two digits for wind speed, followed by YSU, followed by 00.

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