Potential order-of-magnitude enhancement of wind farm power density via counter-rotating vertical-axis wind turbine arrays
By John O. Dabiri. 2010
568 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Modern wind farms comprised of horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs) require significant land resources to separate each wind turbine from the adjacent turbine wakes. This aerodynamic constraint limits the amount of power that can be extracted from a given wind farm footprint. The resulting inefficiency of HAWT farms is currently compensated by using taller wind turbines to access greater wind resources at high altitudes, but this solution comes at the expense of higher engineering costs and greater visual, acoustic, radar, and environmental impacts. We investigated the use of counter-rotating vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) in order to achieve higher power output per unit land area than existing wind farms consisting of HAWTs. Full-scale field tests of 10-m tall VAWTs in various counter-rotating configurations were conducted under natural wind conditions during summer 2010. Whereas modern wind farms consisting of HAWTs produce 2–3 W of power per square meter of land area, these field tests indicate that power densities an order of magnitude greater can potentially be achieved by arranging VAWTs in layouts that enable them to extract energy from adjacent wakes and from above the wind farm. Moreover, this improved performance does not require higher individual wind turbine efficiency, only closer wind turbine spacing and a sufficient vertical flux of turbulence kinetic energy from the atmospheric surface layer. The results suggest an alternative approach to wind farming that has the potential to concurrently reduce the cost, size, and environmental impacts of wind farms.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78b83fa937382ec426edcb19f377be64c6fad551
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In Aerospace Engineering
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- Sadra Sahebzadeh
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- M. Wosnik
Citations in the corpus
- Numerical modelling and optimization of vertical axis wind turbine pairs: A scale up approach (2021, background): “Furthermore, the authors would like to thank Dr Ian Brownstein (Stanford) and Dr John O. Dabiri (Caltech) for sharing their experimental data and for inspiring discussions.”
- Wind-Turbine and Wind-Farm Flows: A Review (2019, background): “It has been shown that placing two counter-rotating VAWTs side-by-side increases the total power efficiency of the pair (Dabiri 2011; Zanforlin and Nishino 2016).”
- Towards optimal layout design of vertical-axis wind-turbine farms: Double rotor arrangements (2020, methodology): “This grants the opportunity for optimal wind farms with higher power output per unit land area compared to existing HAWT wind farms [4], minimum negative wake interactions and even positive wake interactions contributing to higher performance of the farm.”
- Large Eddy Simulation of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Wakes (2014, background): “Recently, Dabiri [2] has claimed that the power density of wind farms consisting of counter-rotating VAWTs can be potentially greater than HAWT wind farms by an order of magnitude.”
- Characterising the near-wake of a cross-flow turbine (2015, background): “The results from their research have been used to argue that VAWTs, due to their increased rate of fluid energy recovery between turbines, can offer significantly more efficient land use compared to axial-flow or horizontal-axis wind turbines (AFTs or HAWTs) [15].”