Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Aerospaziali

POLI-Wind - Wind Energy Lab

Prof. Alessandro Croce

+39 02 2399 8322

In the area of wind tunnel testing, the experimental equipment developed in the course of the last years has now reached full maturity and complete operational capabilities. Major milestones have been represented by experiments successfully conducted with two machines in wake interference conditions with the rotor operating in the wake of the first one designed with aeroelastically-scaled blades equipped with bending-torsion coupling for load alleviation and also with individual blade pitch control.
Regarding design, the automated tools have now reached the ability to conduct the coupled aerostructural optimization of rotor blades equipped with passive control systems, and optionally include the simultaneous optimization of the tower. With respect to the supporting technologies, major progress has been made on the periodic stability analysis of wind turbines. A second important breakthrough has been the demonstration of a wind misalignment observer in the boundary layer wind tunnel as well as using actual field data.

In the area of design, two EU funded projects INNWIND and AVATAR give the opportunity to test the technology developed at the Lab on extremely large rotors (10-20 MW), including the design with bend-twist coupling and other forms of passive load alleviation, and the integration of such concepts with active alleviation techniques based on model-based full span and distributed controllers. The Lab is also actively pursuing opportunities for the demonstration in the field and further maturation of its wind observers and stability analysis tools. In the area of control, work will be expanding towards the control of wind farms.
The work in the experimental focus area will accompany the methodological and numerical developments. Within the rotor design projects, the Lab has already designed and tested the first ever aeroelastically-scaled blade with bend-twist coupling with the aim to validate and calibrate the aeroservoleastic and blade analysis tools developed at the Lab. Work is also well underway on the expansion of the experimental equipment and flow measurements (LIDAR, PIV) to allow for the testing and verification of wind farm control algorithms.