Research on Electric Field Distribution of Multiple wind turbines under Lightning Conditions

Abstract

As a mature renewable energy technology, wind power is an important form of renewable energy power generation. With the increasing installed capacity of wind turbines, the cluster of wind turbines has become more and more popular in china. Wind farms are usually located in open areas, and the wind turbines always stand out from the wind farm, which make the blade of the wind turbines are easily damaged by lightning. So lightning protection of blades is important for the safe operation of wind turbines. In this paper, a calculation model of multiple wind turbines was established in finite element method. Through simulating the electric field distribution of multiple wind turbines under thunder-cloud background and lightning leader, the effects of factors such as lightning leader positions and blade angles of wind turbines on the electric fields distribution of the turbine blades were investigated, and the lightning shielding effect of multiple wind turbines was analyzed. The results show that the variation of the lightning leader position and the blade angle of wind turbines both have influences on the electric field distribution of multiple wind turbines. When the lightning leader position varies in three typical positions, the electric field distributions on the surface of the turbine blades vary with the angle at different positions. When the lightning leader position was unchanged, the variation of wind turbine blade angle would also affect the electric field distribution on the surface of adjacent wind turbine blades. Furthermore, in clustered wind farms the angles of adjacent wind turbine blades are random, and the lightning shielding effect of multiple wind turbines was analyzed considering the influence of blade angle variation on the electric field distribution of adjacent wind turbine blades in this paper. The research results can be regarded as a basis for analyzing lightning strike characteristics of clustered wind farms.