Flow control based 5 MW wind turbine enhanced energy production for hydrogen generation cost reduction

Abstract

Improving the performance and the production of renewable energy sources, especially the wind energy, is considered an attractive approach to reduce the Cost of Energy (COE) associated to the hydrogen generation process. In this context, flow control strategies have been object of detailed investigation during last years. Originally flow control devices were designed to be implemented in the aeronautical sector. Nonetheless, the optimization of the performance of the wind turbine blades with the introduction and implementation of these devices is being widely investigated these days. An analysis of the influence of implementing Vortex Generators (VGs) and Gurney Flaps (GFs) in Wind Turbine Blades (WTBs) on the Annual Energy Production (AEP) of large Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) is proposed in this paper. For that purpose, the Weibull distributions of annual wind speed data series of a real wind farm have been calculated, and Blade Element Momentum (BEM) based calculations have been performed to evaluate the effect of the flow control devices on the power curve and the AEP of the NREL offshore 5 MW Baseline Wind Turbine. The obtained results show an enhancement of the AEP of the turbine of 2.43% during year 2015 and 2.68% during year 2016. As a result, increments of the generated hydrogen volume larger than 130000 Nm3 are achieved during both years with no considerable additional cost in the design of the wind turbine.