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- Category: Articles
A Novel Perspective
Offshore wind energy is playing an increasingly significant role in meeting worldwide energy demand. In these circumstances, the development of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) represents a new challenge for both academia and industry. However, the potential for deep-water multi-megawatt installations and use of strong wind resources make these challenges attractive. In the last decade sophisticated numerical codes have been developed to compute the coupled aerodynamics and hydrodynamics of FOWTs. The complexity of such codes, as well as the limited availability of full-scale data, brings about the need for experimental campaigns and, more specifically, scale tests for validation. Recently tests of FOWTs were performed in various water basins. In this article a complementary approach to test scale models of FOWTs is presented: in particular, the design of a six degrees-of-freedom (DoF) robot, ‘HexaFloat’, capable of reproducing the floating motion of a scale FOWT for wind tunnel experiments.
By Ilmas Bayati and Marco Belloli, Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Meccanica, Milan, Italy
- Category: Articles
When You Bought the Turbine, Did You Buy All the Ideas in It?
The current shift of wind turbine original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) into providing more services has been the result of a need to replenish the revenue drop-off from recent lagging turbine sales, as well as a desire to regulate the services being performed on their turbine fleets.
By Philip Totaro, CEO of IntelStor, USA
- Category: Articles
Automated Scanning for Quality Assurance
All manufacturers of rotor blades for contemporary wind turbines are concerned with the need for an efficient and safe quality assurance (QA) of blade integrity. The manufacture of blades is still a largely manual lay-up and assembly process, where variability in quality is a key issue for the ultimate blade performance.
By Morgan Troedsson, Product Manager, FORCE Technology, Denmark
- Category: Articles
Designing for the Rough as well as the Smooth
Optimal performance of wind turbine blades is critical to ensuring cost-effective power delivery. Aerodynamic behaviour plays a major role in overall efficiency, giving rise to highly refined blade section shapes designed to maximise energy capture. However, with increased performance comes increased sensitivity to changes in operating conditions. This article discusses studies of increasing surface roughness of turbine rotor blades over time and how the effects of the roughness can be modelled
By Chris Langel, Raymond Chow and C.P. van Dam, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Davis, USA
- Category: Articles
Smart Bolting Tools for the Wind Power Industry
In today’s multi-megawatt wind towers, various types of bolting equipment are used to tighten the thousand or more bolted connections in each wind tower. The time when most of these bolts need to be tightened is during the site installation, and the bolting equipment used requires generators and lifting equipment in order to be operated.
By Marcel Birkhoff, General Manager, RAD Torque Systems BV, The Netherlands
- Category: Articles
How Probabilistic Wind Power Prediction can Help in Optimising Operations
It is now widely accepted that wind power forecasts can help utilities and transmission system operators (TSOs) integrate highly variable wind power into their operations. These forecasts are known as ‘deterministic’ predictions and are often based on numerical weather prediction model wind forecasts, which are then optimised and converted to deterministic power forecasts. Now, additionally, forecast providers are beginning to provide ‘probabilistic’ forecasts that can quantify the uncertainty of the prediction. These probabilistic forecasts are traditionally produced by running the models with slightly different scenarios, producing an ensemble of possible predictions. Newer methods are providing ways to accurately quantify the uncertainty with fewer ensemble members or even by creating an ensemble from a single deterministic run – an analog ensemble. Such methods to quantify the uncertainty are making it possible to further optimise wind power integration.
By Dr Sue Ellen Haupt and Dr Luca Delle Monache, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
- Category: Articles
The Use of Train-Generated Mass Airflow to Produce Electricity
When wind power is mentioned, most of us think of the ‘classic’ tower plus blades design of above-ground onshore or offshore wind turbine generators. But, as this article about using the airflow generated by underground trains illustrates, there is potential to adapt wind turbine generator designs to harness ‘wind’ energy from other sources.
By Norman H. Holley, COO, WWT Tunnel, USA
