Piloted Simulation of the Rotorcraft Wind Turbine Wake Interaction during Hover and Transit Flights

Alexander Štrbac,Daniel Heinrich Greiwe,Frauke Hoffmann,Thorsten Lutz,Marion Cormier

doi:10.3390/en15051790

Alexander Štrbac, Daniel Heinrich Greiwe + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/en15051790

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Journal: Energies	Publication Date: Feb 28, 2022
Citations: 2	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: German Aerospace Center, University of Stuttgart

Abstract

Helicopters are used for offshore wind farms for maintenance and support flights. The number of helicopter operations is increasing with the expansion of offshore wind energy, which stresses the point that the current German regulations have not yet been validated through scientific analysis. A collaborative research project between DLR, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Stuttgart and the University of Tübingen has been conducted to examine the sizes of the flight corridors on offshore wind farms and the lateral safety clearance for helicopter hoist operations at offshore wind turbines. This paper details the results of piloted helicopter simulations in a realistic offshore wind farm scenario. The far-wake of rotating wind turbines and the near-wake of non-rotating wind turbines have been simulated with high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics under realistic turbulent inflow conditions. The resulting flow fields have been processed by superposition during piloted simulations in the research flight simulator AVES to examine the flight corridors in transit flights and the lateral safety clearance in hovering flights. The results suggest a sufficient size for the flight corridor and sufficient lateral safety clearance at the offshore wind turbines in the considered scenarios.

Highlights

Received: 19 January 2022Europe’s efforts to develop sustainable and affordable energy production are leading to the rapid expansion of offshore wind energy
For the piloted simulations of Operational Scenario 1 (OS-1), all vortex encounter positions from Table 3 were examined with airwake data C1 and C2
For the piloted simulations of Operational Scenario 2 (OS-2), the hover task was performed with airwake data C4, C5 and C7 (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Received: 19 January 2022Europe’s efforts to develop sustainable and affordable energy production are leading to the rapid expansion of offshore wind energy. Current German regulations for helicopter operations in offshore wind farms to protect helicopters from potentially dangerous wakes of wind turbines (WTs) underlie assumptions, which are not scientifically sound. The HeliOW project (helicopter offshore wind) has been established to assess the suitability of the German regulations to protecting helicopters form potential safety risks. It is a collaborative national research project which includes in situ measurements of WT wakes with unmanned aircraft systems (University of Tübingen [1]), high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations of WT wakes (University of Stuttgart [2–5]), desktop helicopter simulations with mutual interaction between WT wake and helicopter (Technical University of Munich [6,7]) and piloted helicopter simulations in a research flight simulator with a superposition method (DLR [8]).

Results

Discussion

Conclusion