Wind Turbine Performance under Fluctuating Pressure Gradient of Laminar and Turbulent Air Flows

Abstract

This paper puts forward a novel model to evaluate the fluid velocity, power and efficiency of a wind turbine under the fluctuating pressure gradient of laminar and turbulent air flows. The operation parameters of a wind turbine were calculated based on the conservation of momentum, under different velocity profiles, fluctuating amplitudes and wave lengths, revealing the effects of fluctuating air pressure gradient on transient power output of the wind turbine. The effectiveness of the proposed model was verified through evaluation of output power, in comparison with a popular statistical tool. The results show that, whether the flow is laminar or turbulent, the pressure gradient has a positive impact on the output power; the enhancement effect is positively correlated with the fluctuation amplitude, and prominent within the early cycles of fluctuations; for turbulent flow, the more intense the flow, the better the output power.