Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 24: Turbulence and wind energy
DY 24.1: Topical Talk
Thursday, March 25, 2010, 09:30–10:00, H47
Wind energy conversion - how statistical physics can improve our future energy supply — •Stephan Barth1,2, Matthias Wächter1,2, Tanja Mücke1,2, and Joachim Peinke1,2 — 1ForWind - Center for Wind Energy Research, Oldenburg, Germany — 2University of Oldenburg, Institute of Physics, Oldenburg, Germany
Renewable energy sources will play an important role in Europe's future energy supply and for the next decades wind energy will be the major contributor of all renewables. Although being a mature and proven technique with more than 120 GW installed capacity worldwide, future installation plans require further improvements - especially looking at offshore wind energy. Engineers from numerous disciplines have committed themselves to this task. However, an energy supply with a high penetration of wind energy will require modern concepts of statistical physics, too: Wind turbines can be seen as dynamic systems, continuously excited by turbulent fluctuations and therefore showing a quite complex behavior. The commonly used engineering models can not grasp this complex behavior properly. To some extend this leads to a tremendous underestimation of extreme events, e.g. gusts, mechanical loads, et cetera. Modern methods of time series analysis and nonlinear methods provide a more profound description of the wind energy conversion process. We present applications from wind fields to production of electricity itself.