WIND POWER SYSTEM DESIGN FEATURES

The following additional design trade-offs are available to the system engineer:

NUMBER OF BLADES

This is the first determination the design engineer must make. Wind machines have been built with the number of blades ranging from 2 to 40 or more. The high number of blades was used in old low, tip-speed ratio rotors for water pumping, and the application which needs high starting torque.

The modern high, tip-speeds ratio rotors for generating electrical power have two or three blades, many of them with just two. The major factors involved in deciding the number of blades are as follows:

• The effect on power coefficient.
• The design tip-speeds ratio.
• The cost.
• The nacelle weight.
• The structural dynamics.
• The means of limiting yaw rate to reduce gyroscopic fatigue.

Compared to the two-blade design, the three-blade machine has smoother power output and balanced gyroscopic force. There is no need to teeter the rotor, allowing the use of simple rigid hub. Adding the third blade increases the power coefficient only by about 5 percent, thus giving a diminished rate of return for the 50 percent more weight and cost. The two-blade rotor is also simpler to erect, since it can be assembled on the ground and lifted to the shaft without complicated maneuvers during the lift. The number of blades is often viewed as the blade solidity. Higher solidity ratio gives higher starting torque and operates at low speed. For electrical power generation, the turbine must run at high speed since the electrical generator weighs less and operates more efficiently at high speed. That is why all large-scale wind turbines have low solidity ratio, with just two or three blades.

ROTOR UPWIND OR DOWNWIND

Operating the rotor upwind of the tower produces higher power as it eliminates the tower shadow on the blades. This also results in lower noise, lower blade fatigue, and smoother power output. The downwind blades, on the other hand, allow the use of free yaw system. It also allows the blades to deflect away from the tower when loaded. Both types are used at present with no clear trend.

HORIZONTAL AXIS VERSUS VERTICAL AXIS

Most wind turbines built at present have a horizontal axis. The vertical axis Darrieus machine has several advantages. First of all, it is omnidirectional and requires no yaw mechanism to continuously orient itself toward the wind direction. Secondly, its vertical drive shaft simplifies the installation of the gearbox and the electrical generator on the ground, making the structure much simpler. On the negative side, it normally requires guy wires attached to the top for support. This could limit its applications, particularly for the offshore sites. Overall, the vertical axis machine has not been widely used because its output power cannot be easily controlled in high winds simply by changing the blade pitch. With modern low-cost, variable-speed power electronics emerging in the wind power industry, the Darrieus configuration may revive, particularly for large capacity applications.

SPACING OF THE TOWERS

When installing a cluster of machines in a wind farm, certain spacing between the wind towers must be maintained to optimize the power cropping. The spacing depends on the terrain, the wind direction, the speed, and the turbine size. The optimum spacing is found in rows 8 to 12-rotor diameters apart in the wind direction, and 1.5 to 3-rotor diameters apart in the crosswind direction (Figure 5-12). A wind farm consisting of 20 towers rated at 500 kW each need 1 to 2 square kilometers of land area. Of this, only a couple of percent would actually occupy the tower and the access roads. The remaining land could continue its original use (Figure 5-13). The average number of machines in wind farms varies greatly, ranging from several to hundreds depending on the required power capacity.

FIGURE 5-12 Optimum tower spacing in wind farms in flat terrain.

FIGURE 5-13 Original land use continues in a wind farm in.

When the land area is limited or is at a premium price, one optimization study that must be conducted in an early stage of the wind farm design is to determine the number of turbines, their size, and the spacing for extracting the maximum energy from the farm. The trades in such a study are as follows:

• Larger turbines cost less per MW capacity and occupy less land area. 
• Fewer large machines can reduce the MWh energy crop per year, as downtime of one machine would have larger impact on the energy output. 
• The wind power fluctuations and electrical transients on fewer large machines would cost more in electrical filtering of the power and voltage fluctuations, or would degrade the quality of power, inviting penalty from the grid.