Wind Turbine Wake Turbulence

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flightfantastic
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Aug 17, 2008 10:17 am
Location: Podington

Wind Turbine Wake Turbulence

Post by flightfantastic » Tue Mar 08, 2016 1:12 pm

Wind turbines are becoming ever more common in the UK. It might be expected that the wakes generated by a wind turbine have similar characteristics to aircraft wakes (for a nice picture, see: http://www.nrel.gov/news/features/image ... _large.jpg). This means they pose a potential hazard to GA aircraft landing nearby. Increasingly, wind farms are being established in the close vicinity of air strips, and our strip at Podington (near Sywell) is about to suffer an infestation that we can do nothing about (if it comes to the farmer deciding whether to rent land for an airstrip or for wind turbines there's only ever going to be one winner :cry:).

We couldn't find much information on t'Internet related to aircraft and the wind farm company in question knew absolutely nothing about the effect of vortices on aircraft, and, predictably, cared even less. We were not consulted about the siting, only presented with a fait accompli after the planning permission had been agreed, when it was too late to propose alternatives.

The CAA have sponsored a study into the effect of turbulence on GA aircraft: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/flight-scie ... -aircraft/. However, neither the university, nor the CAA, appears to have adequately summarised the findings for the GA community. The original research report is: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livac ... report.pdf. Predictably, distilling out the useful information from this academic paper is somewhat difficult for a layman. Is there anyone out there who could do the job of the CAA and interpret the findings and implications in a way most of us can readily understand (and, perhaps, write a short report in the LAA mag.)?
Alan Jackson
025340

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