Smart Rotors to Improve Wind Energy Efficiency and Sustainability – SMARTEOLE

The control technologies developed in the present project will be applied at different scales, blade, rotor and farm scales, and will be tested from the lab to the full scale for the most mature ones.
Two types of experiments are performed:
- testing at full scale in a wind farm owned by Maia Eolis on the basis of control strategies developed by IFPEN and Maia Eolis with the use of Lidar sensors manufactured by Avent Lidar technology.
- Wind tunnel testing in LHEEA and PRISME facilities, on active flow control on blades with control strategies developed by LAAS-CNRS and PRISME.

These developments will be based on the partners’ expertise on wind energy, Lidar technology, metrology, control sciences and fluid mechanics.

One year after the project launch, first outcomes are very promising regarding the efficiency of pulsed-jets and plasma actuators to modulate the lift coefficient of a wind turbine blade tested in wind tunnel (PRISME and LHEEA). The development of the appropriate closed-loop control tools is under process (LAAS and PRISME). The other parts of the project are related to full scale experiments and this first year was dedicated to the planning of the field testing and the instrumentation of two wind turbines: load cells, inclinometers, nacelle-mounted lidars, scanning lidars, profiler lidars (Maia Eolis and Avent Lidar Technology).
The connection between the nacelle-mounted lidar, enabling the anticipative incoming wind measurement, and the control toolbox developed by IFPEN is now operational. The first measurement campaign started in November 2016 and will last 6 months.

The project develops some technologies with different levels of maturity and then, their application in finalized demonstrators appears at variate time scales. The active flow control on blades will reach the proof of concept at lab scale within the present project but will need to be validated at the full scale in a future project.
The lidar-assisted pitch control should be validated on a full scale wind turbine within the present project. The benefit of the anticipative, rather reactive, control should be quantified. Reducing the aerodynamic load fluctuations through lidar-assisted pitch control will be a reality to exploit.
Some wind farm control scenarii will be tested at full scale in order to improve the overall power production of the farm and to reduce the structural fatigue due to wind turbine wake interactions. Then ,they will have to be validated and implemented in wind farm management strategies

2 articles had been published at EWEA Conference 2015 and at ISNPEDADM 2015 on the active flow control on blade section through plasma actuators. It is planned to massively communicate on the project during the international conference TORQUE 2016 in October 2016. 5 communications will be submitted on the active flow control through pulsed-jet and plasma actuators, on the lidar-assisted pitch control and on the wake measurements through scanning lidar emeasurements.

The ambition of the present project is to improve the efficiency of the wind energy production by proposing innovative control solutions at the scale of the wind farm, the wind turbine and the blade, with an increasing degree of maturity. To take up this challenge, the consortium comprises some expertise from industrial to fundamental research experts, covering all degrees and scales of investigations (theoretical development, experimental testing at lab and at full scale, modeling and simulations) in the domains of fluid mechanics, control sciences and metrology. It is then composed of 2 industrial partners, Maia Eolis and Avent Lidar Technology, and 4 research organizations LML, PRISME, LAAS and IFPEn (application-oriented Research lab). In order to mitigate the aerodynamic load fluctuations that wind turbines are subjected to, SMARTEOLE aims to contribute to the overall problematic by developing a concept of smart rotor which is a rotor monitored by LIDAR-assisted control strategies. This rotor is equipped of an anticipated vision of the incoming flow conditions, with the help of a turbine-mounted LIDAR system developed by ALT, and of distributed actuators and sensors in order to control in real-time the aerodynamic performance of the energetic system. To reach this goal, three different scales of actuation are planned in this project: the blade, the wind turbine and the wind farm scales. Depending on the maturity of the control solutions, two types of experiments will be performed: full scale experiments in ME wind turbine farms with control strategies developed by IFPEn, and small scale ones in wind tunnel facilities of LML and PRISME, with control strategies developed by LAAS and PRISME.
- Blade scale: The objective is to control the aerodynamic performance of the blade through a modification of the pressure distribution, meaning a modification of circulation, with fluidic and/or plasma actuators distributed over the blade. The innovative potential of closed-loop active circulation control to mitigate aerodynamic loads for wind energy applications will be demonstrated through lab experiments.
- Wind turbine scale: The previous control strategy will be tested at lab scale for rotating blades with the help of a wind turbine bench. For full scale issues, the feed-forward pitch control strategies will be developed by the integration of a new input, which is the anticipative measurement of the wind conditions. These optimized strategies will be confronted to the current pitch control strategies implemented in the wind turbines operated by ME. The conventional pitch control is already mature since it is extensively used in industrial wind turbines but the present objective is to improve its performance by adding the LIDAR-assisted functionality, which is a promising but not yet used technology.
-Wind farm scale: some new strategies of distributed production regarding each wind turbine will be proposed according to the incoming wind conditions (wake interactions for instance). During field testing on a wind farm from the operator partner, the performances of its wind turbines will be controlled in real time with dedicated global control strategies developed to maximize the overall farm production. The relevance of the tested strategies will be checked through the instantaneous power production gain.