The effects of yaw misalignment

Awaking awareness with measurements

If your turbines is not aligned with the incoming wind, it experiences yaw misalignment. Thus, it will face accelerated deterioration and will generate less power output. But how can you know that your turbine is misaligned?

Well, you can measure it!

Your turbine will show uneven mechanical loading, which is characteristic for how much it is misaligned. This means that we not only can tell you that your turbine is misaligned, but we can tell you by how much, and thus fix its yaw misalignment.

Let’s take a look at how it works.

If your turbine is negatively misaligned, like in the sketch below on the left, the incoming wind seems to come from the front left instead of head-on. This changes the aerodynamic forces on the blades. The blades will experience increased loading before they reach their highest position and decreased loading after that.

We can see this uneven load distribution in our fos4X strain measurements, shown on the right.

Depending on if the turbine is negatively (yellow line) or positively (blue line) misaligned, the blades either experience increased loading before or after they reach their highest position. From the unevenness of the load distribution, we can figure out by how much the turbine is misaligned.

Understood. Now what?

Contact us to assess how yaw misalignment affects your wind turbines and how to align them correctly!

Are you interested in more information about underperformance? Feel free to contact us!