Abstract

The use of offshore wind farms in Europe to provide a sustainable alternative energy source is now considered normal. Particularly in the North Sea, a large number of wind farms exist with a significant distance from the coast. This is becoming standard practice as larger areas are required to support operations. Efficient transport and monitoring of these wind farms can only be conducted using helicopters. As wind turbines continue to grow in size, there is a need to continuously update operational requirements for these helicopters, to ensure safe operations. This study assesses German regulations for flight corridors within offshore wind farms. A semi-empirical wind turbine wake model is used to generate velocity data for the research flight simulator AVES. The reference offshore wind turbine NREL 5 MW has been used and scaled to represent wind turbine of different sizes. This paper reports result from a simulation study concerning vortex wake encounter during offshore operations. The results have been obtained through piloted simulation for a transport case through a wind farm. Both subjective and objective measures are used to assess the severity of vortex wake encounters.

Highlights

  • Europe’s efforts to development of a sustainable and affordable energy production are leading to the rapid expansion of offshore wind energy

  • The vortex core passage is indicated by the reversal of vertical wind speed at tEN = 2.6 s

  • Due to the misalignment of the helicopter/ vortex longitudinal axis, the helicopter experiences first an upwind followed by a downwind after the vortex encounter

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Summary

Introduction

Europe’s efforts to development of a sustainable and affordable energy production are leading to the rapid expansion of offshore wind energy. Typical offshore wind farms consist of both a number of wind turbines (WT) and a manned offshore substation (OSS). The latter is usually located at the center of the wind farm and is used for maintenance. Transportation of maintenance engineers is performed by crew transfer vessels (CTV) or by rotorcraft. Rotorcraft benefit from short transfer time and their operation within offshore wind farms is in practice limited to sea state 6. Typical maritime helicopter operations are the transportation of maintenance engineers from mainland to the OSS or from the OSS to one single WT. There remain a number of issues regarding the operation of helicopters within wind farms. An overview of recent research activities in Europe is described in a report compiled by members of the GARTEUR Helicopter Action Group 23 (HC-AG23, [7])

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