Wind tunnel blockage corrections forwind turbine measurements

Wind-tunnel measurements are an important step during the windturbinedesign process. The goal of wind-tunnel tests is to estimate theoperational performance of the wind turbine, for example by measuringthe power and thrust coecients. Depending on the sizes of both thewind turbine and the test section, the eect of blockage can be substantial.Correction schemes for the power and thrust coecients havebeen proposed in the literature, but for high blockage and highly loadedrotors these correction schemes become less accurate.A new method is proposed here to calculate the eect a cylindricalwind-tunnel test section has on the performance of the wind turbine.The wind turbine is modeled with a simplied vortex model. Usingvortices of constant circulation to model the wake vortices, the performancecharacteristics are estimated. The test section is modeled witha panel method, adapted for this specic situation. It uses irrotationalaxisymmetric source panels to enforce the solid-wall boundary condition.Combining both models in an iterative scheme allows for thesimulation of the eect of the presence of the test-section walls on windturbines performace.Based on the proposed wind-tunnel model, a more general empirical correlationscheme is proposed to estimate the performance characteristicsof a wind turbine operating under unconned conditions by correctingthe performance measured in the conned wind-tunnel conguration.The proposed correction scheme performs better than the existing correctionschemes, including cases with high blockage and highly loadedrotors