Sandia Labs Wind Farm Adds Vestas Turbine

Illustration of the SWIFT facility, currently under construction, which will study turbine–turbine interactions. In this schematic, the wakes are denoted by white helices and white fog.

The initial phase of Sandia National Laboratories’ Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWIFT) facility, currently being constructed in partnership with Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, will be larger than originally planned. Wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems (Aarhus, Denmark) will add its own 300 kW, V27 research turbine to the two Sandia V27 research turbines.

The Labs worked with Vestas to develop the new three-turbine site plan, tailored to study turbine-to-turbine interactions. Sandia and Vestas will conduct collaborative research with all three turbines, although each turbine can also be used separately with minimal interaction.

“The Lubbock site benefits from high wind resource and low turbulence, which is ideal for research,” says Jon White, project manager and researcher in Sandia’s Wind Energy Technologies group. “Wind at the site comes predominately from the south, making it easy to set up the turbine array for research on turbine-to-turbine interactions.”

Read the rest of the article at Composites World.