Weather-dependency of the thermographic flow visualization of the laminar-turbulent transition on wind turbines

Analyzing the airflow around wind turbines during operation requires an in-process-capable measurement approach that functions without modification of the rotor blade. Infrared–thermographic flow visualization is such a measurement approach. However, its measurement capabilities on wind turbines in operation are highly weather-dependent. Therefore, to understand the expected flow visualization quality in non-laboratory conditions, the dependence of the achievable contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the laminar-turbulent transition on solar radiation and air temperature is studied, respectively. A linear dependence of the contrast on the absorbed solar radiation is derived as a first estimation from a theoretical study of the heat balance. while the air temperature variations are shown to have no effect under certain conditions. The slope of the linear dependence of about 0.025 m2K/W was validated by experiments. To further study the fundamental measurability limit, only the camera noise with constant variance is here applied to determine the achievable contrast-to-noise ratio, which is thus directly proportional to the contrast. As a result, the achievable contrast and CNR for visualizing the laminar-turbulent flow transition over the year, over the day, and for different yaw angles of the wind turbine are determined. For this investigation, a wind turbine location near in northern Germany, is assumed as an example, and a maximal achievable contrast and CNR of 4.2 K and 122, respectively, are estimated, which agree with previous measurements. The presented method applies to any other wind turbine location and thus enables planning thermographic flow measurements on any wind turbine in the world.