Determination of annual energy production loss due to erosion on wind turbine blades

Abstract

Abstract Increasing size of the modern wind turbines amplifies the issues of leading-edge erosion, especially on the outboard sections of the blades, impacting both their structural integrity and aerodynamic efficiency. Predicting and detection of the aerodynamic losses which occurs before a noticeable structural degradation on the blade can be crucial for operational predictive maintenance strategies to avoid significant loss production. This paper presents the results from the collaborative study between DTU and CENER in order to investigate the influence of leading-edge erosion on wind turbine aerodynamic performance. For this purpose, three distinct erosion scenarios are analyzed by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), both 2D and 3D, blade-element momentum theory (BEM) based solver (OpenFAST) and a Simplified Aerodynamic Loss Tool (SALT). The results from previous studies are used as an input for these tools, with outputs from each tool complementing and reinforcing one another. Furthermore, annual energy production (AEP) reductions due to leading-edge erosion across these tools are compared and validation of the SALT tool is presented. It is observed that the thrust and power losses from both CFD and OpenFAST exhibit comparable results and for a severe erosion case, spanning the last third of the blade, results in a 4.3 % reduction in the annual energy production.