• Field Ice Monitoring Stations
• Cold Climate Chambers
• Thermal Infrared Based Ice Detection System
• Low speed wind tunnels
• Advanced computer aided engineering software for numerical simulations of icing & wind resource assesment

NUC has a good cold room chamber facility, where artificial ice can be genrated within a well controlled temperature range from ( +10 to -30 C).

Atmospheric icing team of NUC is using this facilty to perform some basic lab based experiments, without going for expensive icing tunnels.

Average annual power production losses of wind turbines due to atmospheric ice accretion and cold environment are estimated to be about 20%.

Complete loss of power production, reduction of power due to disrupted aerodynamics, overloading due to delayed stall and increased fatigue of components due to imbalance ice load are main documented effects of ice accretion on wind turbine blades

The Key Research Topics in this topic are:

• Field measurements of icing events
• Numerical simulations of the wind resource assessment over large terrains
• Complex multiphase numerical simulations of atmospheric ice accretion
• Designing of ice detection and mitigation systems

Ice accretion on wind turbine blade causes a change in blade profile shape that consequently also effects the wind turbine acoustic. This study will help to better understand the noise generation from wind turbine blade at different accreted icing conditions. As ice accretion along wind turbine blade is not symmetrical and different sections from blade tip to blade root can experience different ice loads and shapes. This study will help to draw the guidelines for future researchers to better estimate the wind turbine acoustic in icing conditions. This work is lead by The Arctic Technology Research Team at University of Tromsø, in Narvik, Norway.