Power Performance Measurements of the NREL CART-2 Wind Turbine Using a Nacelle-Based Lidar Scanner

Abstract

Abstract Different certification procedures in wind energy, such as power performance testing or load estimation, require measurements of the wind speed, which is set in relation to the electrical power output or the turbine loading. The wind shear affects the behavior of the turbine as hub heights and rotor diameters of modern wind turbines increase. Different measurement methods have been developed to take the wind shear into account. In this paper an approach is presented where the wind speed is measured from the nacelle of a wind turbine using a scanning lidar system. The measurement campaign was performed on the two-bladed Controls Advanced Research Turbine (CART-2) at the National Wind Technology Center in Colorado. The wind speed of the turbine inflow was measured and recalculated in three different ways: using an anemometer installed on a meteorological mast, using the nacelle-based lidar scanner, and using the wind turbine itself. Here, the wind speed was recalculated from turbine data using the wind turbine as a big horizontal anemometer. Despite the small number of useful data, the correlation between this so-called rotor effective wind speed and the wind speed measured by the scanning nacelle-based lidar is high. It could be demonstrated that a nacelle-based scanning lidar system provides accurate measurements of the wind speed converted by a wind turbine. This is a first step, and it provides evidence to support further investigations using a much more extensive dataset and refines the parameters in the measurement process.