Each week, we will be publishing layman’s abstracts of new articles from our prestigious portfolio of journals in statistics. The aim is to highlight the latest research to a broader audience in an accessible format.

The article featured today is from Quality and Reliability Engineering International, with the full article now available to read on Early View here.

Su, C, Wu, J, Jiang, G, Zhang, N, Song, X. Uncertainty analysis of wind speed of wind turbine. Qual Reliab Eng Int. 2023; 1– 17. https://doi.org/10.1002/qre.3315

Because wind speed changes are caused by many factors such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, topography, geographical location, etc., it has a large random fluctuation, leading to a large uncertainty. The main factors that cause this uncertainty are all caused by the differences in time and space. The uncertainty of load is an important reason for increasing the risk of system failure. Based on the hourly ground observation data of meteorological stations, four observation stations are taken as the research object of the uncertainty of the spatial distribution of wind speed. Four observation stations are divided into single day and one week, and seven data analysis indicators and normal distribution models are applied to analyze the uncertainty of the spatial and temporal distribution of wind speed day and night. The results show that both spatial distribution and temporal distribution are important factors causing uncertainty of wind speed. Due to different geographical locations, the time domain diagrams of wind speed at four stations are different, and the maximum wind speed, fluctuation frequency and amplitude of wind speed at each observation station are different; The wind speed distribution of a single day and a week is quite different. The data of a single day and a week are analyzed by day and night. The day and night are very different from the overall data analysis. The necessity of considering the time and space distribution to study the wind speed uncertainty of wind turbines is verified, and it is concluded that the normal distribution is not suitable for fitting the distribution model of the four sites studied, which lays the foundation for determining the wind speed distribution model, analyzing the power characteristics of wind turbines, evaluating the power generation of wind turbines and analyzing the reliability.