The energy budgets of small endotherms are profoundly affected by characteristics of the physical environment such as wind speed, air temperature and solar radiation. Among these, solar radiation represents a potentially very large heat load to small animals and may have an important influence on their thermoregulatory metabolism and heat balance. In this investigation, we examined the interact...

This paper considers short-term energy management of a wind power plant with battery storage, in order to smooth the variations of power output to the external grid. An optimal on-line heuristic is developed for a control environment, in which decision-making is independent of wind historical data and forecasts.

Background: NASA World Wind is an open source application-programming interface for developing geographic information systems based on a virtual globe rendering engine representing a planet. NASA World Wind provides the ideal environment for scientific data, their analysis, visual representation and interaction with users, in a single platform, which can be deployed both as a Java desktop appli...

Recent observations of Wolf-Rayet (WR) binaries WR151 and WR155 infer that their stellar winds are asymmetric. We show that such asymmetries can alter the stellarwind bubble structure, bringing the wind-termination shock closer to the WR star. If the wind asymmetry is caused by rotation, the wind density and distance to the wind-termination shock are both decreased along the rotation axis by a ...

This work presents a comparison between the Annual Energy Output (AEO) of two commercial vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) for a low-wind urban site: both a drag-driven and a liftdriven concepts are examined in order to be installed on top of the new Via dei Giustinelli building, Trieste (Italy). The power-curves, taken from the product specification sheets, have been matched to the wind char...

Recently, the rapid expansion of wind energy activity has led to an increasing number of publications that deal with wind turbine health monitoring. In real practice, implementing a prognostics and health management (PHM) strategy for wind turbines is challenging. Indeed, wind turbines are complex electro-mechanical systems that often work under rapidly changing environment and operating load c...

This work proposes an innovative control technique for improving the contribution to the grid frequency regulation provided by a set of wind power generators belonging to a wind farm. Models of individual generators and of the conventional grid primary frequency control are developed and used for designing a model predictive controller. A proper estimation algorithm is also introduced in order ...

This paper addresses the influence of parametric uncertainties on the wind excited response of structures. Based on the available experimental data from both laboratory and field studies, the variability in the parameters related to the wind environment and meterological data, kinematics of wind flow field, wind-structure interaction and structural properties is assessed. The random variability...