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- Category: Articles
Some Results and Conclusions
This article focuses on historical component failure and the availability of replacements in both onshore and offshore wind farms. It also looks at techniques available to calculate the effect of mean time between failure of critical components and mean time to repair and how such techniques can be applied to all projects. It considers the impact of failures on year-to-year availability, the sufficiency of contractual warranties, financial planning for repairs and current best practice operation and maintenance (O&M) strategies for projects. This includes evaluating what proactive measures can be taken and how condition monitoring techniques can improve mean time to repair times.
By Steve Buckley, Team Leader, Sinclair Knight Merz, UK
- 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
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