Dynamics and Destabilisation of Helical Vortices

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Wind turbine wake effects can significantly reduce the global power production of wind parks. In order to achieve a quicker recovery of the wake velocity deficit, exciting the wake in order to induce earlier wake breakdown has been proposed as an attractive possibility to reduce these effects. For the efficient development of such wake control techniques, understanding instabilities and their driving parameters is necessary. The UBeRT Project aims to investigate the fundamental physics of helical wake breakdown. This shall be achieved by establishing a unique and novel experimental and numerical testbed for investigating instabilities. Response to wake excitation measures shall be explored using three turbine models: i) An experimental turbine (UBeRT), ii) a kinematically scaled numerical twin of the UBeRT (NumBeRT), that shall operate in air instead of water, and, iii) a generic full-scale 15 MW turbine numerical model (IEA 15MW). The UBeRT rotor shall be operated in the large towing tank at VWS (TU Berlin) in order to achieve higher Reynolds number than in a conventional wind tunnel. Simulations of the numerical twin NumBeRT shall serve to evaluate transferability of the experimental results in the air. Simulations of the IEA 15MW wind turbine shall provide information about possible scaling effects and address the effects of broadband inflow turbulence on wake stability. Fundamental investigation of modal and frequency content of helical wakes under excitation of long- and short-wave instabilities is required to understand the fundamental physics of helical wake breakdown. Long-wave instabilities shall be introduced numerically and experimentally via a periodic variation of the relative inflow velocity. Short-wave instabilities shall be introduced experimentally via a secondary vortex emerging from the blade tip section, which through interaction with the tip vortex shall give raise to a short-wave instability. Numerically, it shall be introduced via an added vorticity at the blade tip which shall create an elliptic instability in the vortex core. The proposed project aims further at identifying unstable modes excited through turbulent inflow and which interaction mechanisms occur between inflow turbulence and the helical vortex. Modal analysis of the wake development shall reveal the perturbation scales that lead to the quickest instability growth. Highly-resolved velocity fields of the wake development and breakdown downstream of the UBeRT rotor will be collected by means of stereo Particle Image Velocimetry. High-fidelity scale-resolving simulations of the NumBeRT rotor and the IEA15MW turbine will be performed with the flow solver FLOWer. Both data sets will be publicly available for code comparisons and validation of lower order wake models while complementing existing turbine databases, which do not explicitly focus on wake breakdown phenomena.