Posters

Abstract

One of the biggest topics in safely operating onshore wind turbines is ice falling from standing turbines or being thrown from turbines in operation. This poses a risk for both public and wind farm employees. The ice build-up on the turbines and the following shedding of the ice is a complex process, involving both meteorology, turbine design and operational strategy. There are several models that calculate the risk of ice throw around the turbines, but the experimental data to validate these models are thin. There have been several attempts to collect data, and many of them involve manually collecting ice pieces after an icing event. This is both tedious and potentially risky. In order to validate our models used to estimate the ice throw risk in the wind farm we established a goal in the research project “Wind Energy in Icing Climates” to gather information about the landing positions of ice pieces around wind turbines.. Three drone campaigns were carried out at the wind farm Storheia on the Norwegian west coast during 2021 and 2022. Georeferenced high quality drone photos allowed us to identify the location of craters in the snow from ice that has been thrown or has fallen from four of the wind turbines in the wind farm. The size of the craters were also registered as a estimate of the potential size or impact energy of the falling ice fragment. From the three campaigns more that 7000 craters were registered. The campaign was carried together with Fosen Vind. The drones are owned and operated by aersea, who delivered great quality photos. The research project is led by Kjeller Vindteknikk and Norconsult, in collaboration with Fosen Vind, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Zephyr, Fortum, Fred Olsen Renewables and Hydro, with funding from the research council of Norway.