A Three-tiered Approach for Designing and Evaluating Performance Characteristics of Novel Wecs

As the wind energy market matures and becomes more competitive, it is increasingly important that new entrants realize the full potential of their wind energy conversion system (WECS) early in their product development cycle. Traditionally, the evaluation of potential performance characteristics has been limited to full-scale prototype testing in a field environment. This method can be both costly and time consuming, and, unless conducted carefully, can lead to erroneous results. A more practical approach is to integrate multiple design tools and to use each to the extent of its capabilities. The threetiered approach described in this paper integrates numerical assessment tools, reduced-scale testing in a controlled environment, and full-scale field-testing. Each of these tools provide unique opportunities and limitations, but properly integrated, they can provide a method for designing and evaluating performance characteristics at a cost and time frame significantly less than traditional methods. The exact integration of each these analysis techniques will tend to be device specific since the limitations of each tool will depend on the characteristics of the WECS. While each of these three tools have been used in the past, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that this integrated three-tiered approach has been utilized specifically for designing and evaluating the performance characteristics of WECS.