Wind Tunnel transient aerodynamic performance testing of a small wind turbine

During the last years, the widespread development of wind systems has pushed the interest in producing energy also through a distributed multitude of small wind turbines installed in urban areas. This interest hasn’t been supported by the technology development due to the lack of investment from large industrial companies. Even the methods for testing such kind of devices haven’t been improved and tailored on the specific operational characteristics; indeed the time scale on which the test of small devices should be basedcan be very different from the one used for multi-MW aerogenerators. In this work, a new method to test and analyse the operation of small wind energy converters is developed and validated through Wind Tunnel experiments. Differently from the standards used for large wind turbines, the proposed method uses a very short time scale to define how a small wind converter is able to use transient wind regimes.