- Category: Articles
Measuring Stresses and Strains in Difficult Environments
This article discusses the design and capability of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems deployed on offshore wind turbines. The application of SHM systems in difficult environments is a particularly challenging task, where ease of installation, ruggedness and reliability of equipment is essential in providing the key information of the structural integrity of offshore wind turbine towers. This is required to evaluate the structural response, status and remaining operational life of the structure.
By Paul Faulkner, Senior Product Manager, and Mark Hassell, Business Development Manager, Strainstall Monitoring , UK
- Category: Articles
Reducing the Cost of Energy for Larger Wind Turbines
Current technical evolution within the wind energy industry seems to indicate an increase in the installed power per tower, thus leading to a need to progressively increase the length of the wind turbine blades. The IndeModular joint system is an innovative solution that overcomes the restrictions related to the manufacturing and transport of longer blades. It is a bolted connection located in the blade spar cap, where the main loads are transmitted. The joint system consists of cell units, which are pre-stressed after their assembly, resulting in a joint system under compression loads and allowing high fatigue resistance. Because of its geometry, IndeModular allows a higher supported and transmitted load than other conventional solutions, and, because of its modular concept, it can be easily integrated in the design and manufacturing of blades of different architectures and lengths by adding more or less cell units. IndeModular was successfully tested in a full-scale mechanical test to validate the joint system under the Germanischer Lloyd 2010 guidelines.
By Javier Sanz, CEO, and José Miguel Maruri, Product Manager, INDEOL, Spain
- Category: Articles
Wind power has the potential to provide affordable electrical power throughout much of the world, and there is certainly more than one way to do it. The patented revolutionary INVELOX wind technology, developed by the American company SheerWind, is providing an effective alternative to conventional propeller-driven wind-harvesting systems. In this article, Dr Daryoush Allaei notes some of the problems with conventional wind power generation and then goes on to describe how the innovative INVELOX wind technology could change the game.
Dr Daryoush Allaei, Chief Technical Officer, SheerWind, Inc.
- Category: Articles
In the following article several key issues relating to the optimisation of the availability and performance of wind turbines are introduced. Within the context of ‘smart grids’, it is shown that techniques exist that will increasingly support operators in optimising the profitability of their wind farms.
By Christopher Gray, Managing Partner, Uptime Engineering, Austria
- Category: Articles
A new research report published by consultancy IntelStor has catalogued over 27,500 global patent filings related to horizontal-axis, utility scale wind turbine technology. As Philip Totaro, CEO and Principal of IntelStor, says: ‘We estimate there are ~45,000 to 50,000 global filings in total, and we are continuing our research to catalogue and evaluate them all.’
By Philip Totaro, Principal, IntelStor, USA
- Category: Articles
Small and medium wind turbines (SMWT) frequently offer the most environmentally friendly and cost-competitive technology for rural electrification in developing countries. But they are often left out of the energy solution options considered by decision-makers and project developers.
By Simon Rolland, Secretary General of the Alliance for Rural Electrification, Brussels, Belgium
- Category: Articles
One of the areas of research that is attracting much interest within the wind power industry at the moment is site-specific meteorological observations for wind farms. The use of precise information on how a wind farm's local weather conditions correlate with more general regional forecasts, and how these conditions are reflected in the behaviour of the turbines at a specific site, has a profound effect on both the economic performance of the farm and its operations and maintenance plans. This article presents a new way of collecting this data; at first it may appear just a novel possibility, but, if successfully developed, it could prove an extremely cost-effective and reliable method.
By Gregor Giebel and Uwe Schmidt Paulsen, DTU Wind Energy, Joachim Reuder, University of Bergen, and Anders La Cour-Harbo, Aalborg University
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