Publications related to Wind Engineering and Renewable Energy Laboratory

Towards an improved understanding of wind turbine wakes in complex terrain

In this thesis, we explored the effect of certain terrain-induced flow phenomena on the development of wind turbines sited in complex terrain. A combined experimental and analytical approach is used to study wind turbine wakes in different types of complex ...

EPFL2024

Enhancing Wind Farm Performance through Axial Induction and Tilt Control: Insights from Wind Tunnel Experiments

Fernando Porté Agel, Guillem Armengol Barcos

Static axial induction control and tilt control are two strategies that have the potential to increase power production in wind farms, mitigating wake effects and increasing the available power for downstream turbines. In this study, wind tunnel experiment ...

MDPI2024

Power performance of a model floating wind turbine subjected to cyclic pitch motion: A wind tunnel study

Fernando Porté Agel, Guiyue Duan, Daniele Gattari

Wind tunnel experiments were performed with a miniature floating wind turbine model to study the effects of cyclic pitch motion on its power performance. The cyclic pitch motion was prescribed by two key parameters: pitch frequency and amplitude. The power ...

IOPscience2024

The effect of nacelle-to-rotor size on the wake of a miniature wind turbine

Fernando Porté Agel, Arslan Salim Dar, Rim Majzoub

Wind tunnel experiments are performed to investigate the effect of nacelle-to-rotor size on the wake of a wind turbine under different Reynolds numbers. Four different turbine configurations are tested, which vary in the rotor diameter and nacelle length a ...

IOP Science2024

Wind turbine wake superposition under pressure gradient

Fernando Porté Agel, Arslan Salim Dar

We investigate the effect of pressure gradient on the cumulative wake of multiple turbines in wind tunnel experiments spanning across a range of adverse pressure gradient (APG), zero pressure gradient (ZPG), and favorable pressure gradient (FPG). Compared ...

2024

Improvements to the dynamic wake meandering model by incorporating the turbulent Schmidt number

Fernando Porté Agel, Peter Andreas Brugger, Corey Dean Markfort

Predictions of the dynamic wake meandering model (DWMM) were compared to flow measurements of a scanning Doppler lidar mounted on the nacelle of a utility-scale wind turbine. We observed that the wake meandering strength of the DWMM agrees better with the ...

2024

Turbulence and Heat exchange in the Near-Surface Boundary Layer over Patchy Snow

Michael Haugeneder

The atmospheric layer adjacent to the earth's surface is of crucial importance for weather models due to the exchange of energy between the surface and the atmosphere. This exchange is dependent on the various surface properties and influences the state of ...

EPFL2024

Snowfall deposition in mountainous terrain: a statistical downscaling scheme from high-resolution model data on simulated topographies

Michael Lehning

One of the primary causes of non-uniform snowfall deposition on the ground in mountainous regions is the preferential deposition of snow, which results from the interaction of near-surface winds with topography and snow particles. However, producing high-r ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Understanding snow saltation parameterizations: lessons from theory, experiments and numerical simulations

Michael Lehning, Armin Sigmund, Daniela Brito Melo

Drifting and blowing snow are important features in polar and high mountain regions. They control the surface mass balance in windy conditions and influence sublimation of snow and ice surfaces. Despite their importance, model representations in weather an ...

2024

Optimal blade pitch control for enhanced vertical-axis wind turbine performance

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Sébastien Le Fouest

Vertical-axis wind turbines are great candidates to enable wind power extraction in urban and off-shore applications. Currently, concerns around turbine efficiency and structural integrity limit their industrial deployment. Flow control can mitigate these ...

Nature Research2024

Modular Multiplatform Compatible Air Measurement System (MoMuCAMS): a new modular platform for boundary layer aerosol and trace gas vertical measurements in extreme environments

Julia Schmale, Andrea Baccarini, Roman Pohorsky

The Modular Multiplatform Compatible Air Measurement System (MoMuCAMS) is a newly developed in situ aerosol and trace gas measurement platform for lower-atmospheric vertical profiling. MoMuCAMS has been primarily designed to be attached to a Helikite, a ru ...

2024

An improved analytical framework for flow prediction inside and downstream of wind farms

Fernando Porté Agel, Marwa Souaiby

This study evaluates available analytical wake models for flow prediction inside and downstream of wind farms of different sizes and layouts using large-eddy simulation (LES), and introduces an enhanced analytical framework. All the tested analytical wake ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Non-contact sensing for anomaly detection in wind turbine blades: A focus-SVDD with complex-valued auto-encoder approach

Olga Fink, Gaëtan Michel Frusque

The occurrence of manufacturing defects in wind turbine blade (WTB) production can result in significant increases in operation and maintenance costs of WTBs, reduce capacity factors of wind farms, and occasionally lead to severe and disastrous consequence ...

2024

Intermediate complexity atmospheric modeling in complex terrain: is it right?

Michael Lehning, Dylan Stewart Reynolds, Michael Haugeneder

Dynamic downscaling of atmospheric forcing data to the hectometer resolution has shown increases in accuracy for landsurface models, but at great computational cost. Here we present a validation of a novel intermediate complexity atmospheric model, HICAR, ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

An improved statistical wake meandering model

Fernando Porté Agel, Peter Andreas Brugger, Corey Dean Markfort

A new statistical wake meandering (SWM) model is proposed that improves on existing models in the literature. Compared to the existing SWM models, the proposed model has a closed description that does not require simulations to create look-up tables while ...

IOP Publishing2024

Mode I fracture of thick adhesively bonded GFRP composite joints for wind turbine rotor blades

Véronique Michaud, Anastasios Vassilopoulos, Jialiang Fan

This article investigates the effects of voids, joint geometry, and test conditions on the quasi-static Mode I fracture performance of thick adhesive Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) joints such as those prevailing in wind industry and shipbuilding. The specim ...

2024

Good enough: Intermediate complexity atmospheric models improve the representation of processes affecting seasonal snow

Dylan Stewart Reynolds

Snow plays a crucial role in processes regulating ecosystems, the climate, and human development. Mountain snowpack in particular has great relevance for downstream communities. Knowledge about the distribution and properties of the snowpack thus help in p ...

EPFL2024

Noise-induced transitions past the onset of a steady symmetry-breaking bifurcation: The case of the sudden expansion

François Gallaire, Edouard Boujo, Yves-Marie François Ducimetière

We consider fluid flows, governed by the Navier-Stokes equations, subject to a steady symmetry-breaking bifurcation and forced by a weak noise acting on a slow timescale. By generalizing the multiple-scale weakly nonlinear expansion technique employed in t ...

2024

Comparison of selected surface level ERA5 variables against in‐situ observations in the continental Arctic

Julia Schmale, Jakob Boyd Pernov, Jules Gros-Daillon

In this study, data from 17 ground-based, continental Arctic observatories areused to evaluate the performance of the European Centre for Medium-RangeWeather Forecasts Reanalysis version 5 (ERA5) reanalysis model. Three aspectsare evaluated: (i) the overal ...

2024

The Influence of the Planetary Boundary Layer on the Atmospheric State at an Orographic Site at the Eastern Mediterranean

Athanasios Nenes, Romanos Foskinis, Kunfeng Gao

We studied the influence of the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) on the air masses sampled at the mountaintop Hellenic Atmospheric Aerosol and Climate Change station ((HAC) 2 ) at Mount Helmos (Greece) during the Cloud-AerosoL InteractionS in the Helmos back ...

Stockholm Univ Press2024