What are Wind Energy Systems?
Wind turbines are designed to operate individually, as if they would be alone in a field. In practice they are almost always installed as part of a group of turbines.
The behavior and performance of the entire group — the system — is as important as the characteristics of each individual turbine.
- Interactions among turbines are not directly taken into account, and can lead to losses as great as 25%.
- Some turbines fail more often, leading to unplanned maintenance that is 500% more costly than planned maintenance.
A $1.6M Cyber-physical Systems grant to Purdue from the NSF (CS and ME partnership) is aimed at Cooperative Control of Wind Farms to address these issues.