Wind tunnel test of wind turbine in United States and Europe

미국과 유럽의 풍력터빈 풍동실험

In spite of fast growing of prediction codes, there is still not negligible uncertainty in their results. This uncertainty affects on the turbine structural design and power production prediction. With the growing size of wind turbine, reducing this uncertainty is becoming one of critical issues for high performance and efficient wind turbine design. In this respect, there are international efforts to evaluate and tune prediction codes of wind turbine. As the reference data for this purpose, field test data is not appropriate because of its uncontrollable wind characteristics and its inherent uncertainty. Wind tunnel can provide controllable wind. For this reason, NREL has done the full scale test of the 10m turbine at NASA-Ames. With this reference data, a blind comparison has been done with participation of 18 organizations with 19 modeling tools. The results were not favorable. In Europe, a similar project is going on. Nine organizations from five countries are participating in the MEXICO project to do full scale wind tunnel tests and calculation with prediction codes. In this study. these two projects were reviewed in respect of wind tunnel test and its contribution. As a conclusion, it is suggested that scale model wind tunnel tests can be a complementary tool to calculation codes which were evaluated worse than expected.