BRIGE: Exploring New Parameters for Wind Turbine Array Design and Its Impact on Extracted Energy Availability

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Intellectual Merit: The number of wind turbines (WT) in a park is usually restricted to a fixed, limited geographical area. This BRIGE project is a wind tunnel experimental study to test new possible parameters, which can impact the extracting capabilities of the wind turbine, thus providing new insight in wind turbine array design. The wind tunnel experiments will be carried out at the new state-of-the-art wind tunnel facility at Portland State University. The obtained data will be used to address the following issues for the various configurations: (i) test parameters such as turbine height, rotation, spacing and tip-speed ratio as well as geometrical arrangement to understand its impact on the power extraction, (ii) use Tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry (Tomo-PIV) to measure high-resolution velocity maps in wind tunnel models of WT arrays under the selected tested configurations and understand these more in depth, and (iii) employ Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) data analysis technique to observe the flow structures and more importantly to identify the energy containing modes. Results will provide tools for designing optimal WT arrays, lead to economic impact and potentially aid computer modelers in simulating such arrays. Broader impacts: The planned research will advance the applicability, efficiency, and understanding of the long-term sustainability of wind energy extraction from the atmospheric environment. The project will also have several outreach components including: (i) expose a PhD student to an international experience in Oslo, Norway (with Norwegian Defense Research Establishment), (ii) work with a high school in Portland (Gladstone High School), which has a sustainability background, to raise their awareness in the area of wind energy and to keep students motivated in the area of STEM, (iii) recruit undergraduate students from Puerto Rico to attend summer programs and mentor them for academic careers in the fields of energy and sustainability, and (iv) involve hired undergraduates and graduate students in the already-in-place MESA day.