Abstract:
Evaluation of the power potential of a particular type of wind turbine at a specific site is necessary for economic decisions. Therefore, the information of a wind turbine and that of a site have to be measured or predicted and then combined with the power curve of a wind turbine. The main objective of this research was to predict the power potential of the existing small wind turbine with a diameter of 3m and the wind turbine site at the University of Siegen and compare with the annual energy calculated from the measured one year of wind and turbine data. Techniques for prediction of the wind speed distribution of a site were determined and modeled. The power curve of the wind turbine was modeled from data recorded by applying a technique from the novel methods for modelling the power curve. In this research, artificial neural network, Weibull and Rayleigh are the techniques modeled to predict wind speed distribution at the wind turbine site. Rayleigh and Weibull were chosen since the two models depict a better wind speed distribution and require the mean and the standard deviation of the wind speed at the wind turbine site. A neural network trained with the backward propagation levernberg-Marquardt algorithm was applied to predict the wind speed and power potential of the wind turbine site. A comparison between Weibull, Rayleigh and the Levernberg-Marquardt trained neural network wind speed was made. The power curve of the wind turbine was successfully evaluated from wind data and wind turbine data recorded. The results indicate that the annual mean wind speed of the region is 2.54 (m/s) and about 20% of the wind availability was blowing from the west. The annual energy yield predicted from the trained neural network was 372 (kWh) closer to that determined from measured wind speed 360 (kWh) than that determined from Weibull and Rayleigh 337 and 233 (kWh) respectively. The three prediction models are applicable in any region to predict the annual energy of a particular wind turbine site with minimal data available.
