Stereo particle image velocimetry set up for measurements in the wake of scaled wind turbines

Stereo particle image velocimetry measurements were carried out in the boundary layer test section of Politecnico di Milano large wind tunnel to survey the wake of a scaled wind turbine model designed and developed by Technische Universitat Munchen. The stereo PIV instrumentation was set up to survey the three velocity components on cross-flow planes at different longitudinal locations. The area of investigation covered the entire extent of the wind turbines wake that was scanned by the use of two separate traversing systems for both the laser and the cameras. Such instrumentation set up enabled to gain rapidly high quality results suitable to characterise the behaviour of the flow field in the wake of the scaled wind turbine. This would be very useful for the evaluation of the performance of wind farm control methodologies based on wake redirection and for the validation of CFD tools.