A Study on the Effects of Turbulence to Ultimate Loads Acting on the Blade of Wind Turbine

This study has analysed the ultimate loads acting on a wind turbine which is operating in a high turbulent flow condition because the ultimate loads are critical factors on the safe design of wind turbine. Since wind flow on the most parts of Korean mountainous are strongly influenced by complex configurations of the topography, turbulence intensity on somewhere is so stronger than an international design standard. For this reason, the characteristics of turbulent wind data collected from actual sites were analyzed and used for the ultimate load evaluation of the wind turbine. With the 270 design load cases on the international standards, the differences of ultimate loads on the wind turbine operating in the standard or high turbulent wind condition are calculated and compared for the an enhanced knowledge of the safe design basis. As are result, it is revealed the specific ultimate loads are strongly affected by the high turbulent wind conditions, thus the characteristics of turbulent flow must be considered during the design of wind turbine.