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- Category: Articles
Investigating the Performance of Wind Turbine Rotors with Damaged SurfacesWind turbines are designed to operate for at least 20 years and to always operate efficiently. For this reason, aerodynamic wind turbine rotor designers have ensured for many decades that the rotors can operate in a reliable way, even if the leading edges of blades are contaminated with, for example, bugs, dust or pollen. It has, therefore, been important to investigate the performance of each blade section – the aerofoils – with and without leading-edge roughness. From around 2010 there has been an increasing focus on the performance of wind turbine blades with eroded leading edges. Such erosion can appear simply by rain hitting the blade leading edge. The exact performance loss from wind turbines with eroded leading edges is neither easily predicted nor easily measured. This article describes how DTU Wind and Energy Systems in Denmark in collaboration with many companies and researchers tries to handle this issue.
By Christian Bak, DTU Wind and Energy Systems, Denmark
- Category: Articles
Technology’s Role in Making Floating Wind a Sustainable Energy Source
Floating wind is an exciting prospect, but more work is needed to bring down costs and the levelised cost of energy to compete with traditional offshore wind and fossil fuels. This article explains how remote monitoring could make sure floating wind is financially viable.By Wouter Maas, Strategy Director Offshore Wind O&M, Fugro, the Netherlands
- Category: Articles
The Open Group Extending Open-Source Data Platform to New EnergyIn 2018, a group of oil and gas companies began exploring how they could share their non-competitive assets, resources and competencies to collaboratively build a common data platform to help them utilise new technologies, such as cloud services, and operate more efficiently. They enlisted the help of The Open Group®, known for its successful stewardship of multiple forums (e.g. Architecture, Security, Process Automation, Open Footprint), to manage the new OSDU™ Forum. In 2021, this group announced the Mercury Release of an open-source data platform with capabilities supporting the subsurface realm of oil and gas. Today and going forward, work continues on expanding the capabilities to oil production, carbon capture, utilisation and storage, and new energy, including wind power. This article gives an overview of the OSDU Forum and an update on the status of its wind project.
By David W. Smith, Solutions Architect, Baker Hughes, USA
- Category: Articles
Harnessing Energy from the Wind at High Altitudes
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By Kristian Petrick, Secretary General, Airborne Wind Europe, Belgium
- Category: Articles
Climbing Robot Performs Leading-Edge Blade Repair in the Field
Leading-edge blade damage can compromise the aerodynamic performance of a wind turbine by up to 3%. A significant problem today, blade damage caused by rain erosion, occurring when the blade hits rain droplets at tip speeds reaching 380km/h, will only become more problematic with the ever-increasing blade lengths of modern turbines. Repairs are complex to perform, requiring not only skilled manual work hundreds of metres above the ground but also specialist tools, polymer coatings, substrate materials and application skills. Blade failure, with the consequence of long turbine downtime, can be the result if the blade is not maintained.By Martin Huus Bjerge, CEO, Rope Robotics, Denmark
- Category: Articles
Using Doppler Radar to Document Wind-Energy-Relevant Flow FieldsSpecialised Doppler radar has continued its emergence as a powerful, complementary technology to provide remotely sensed maps of the wind to serve a broad range of wind energy interests. Rapid scan speeds, excellent along-beam resolution and a large maximum range allow for the simultaneous capture of wind flow fields at disparate scales of motion. Hence, the measurement tool contributes information concurrently to a wide range of issues facing the industry while also collecting weather insights to bolster operational decision-making. The combined deployment of two or more radar systems allows for the construction of synthesised wind fields where the full horizontal wind vector can be resolved over a three-dimensional domain horizontally covering an entire wind farm and vertically extending through the depth of the rotor sweep. As the cost of the early-stage technology continues to decrease in the face of growing wind turbine and wind farm deployment size and complexity, Doppler radar sits uniquely positioned to expand its contribution to the industry in the coming years.
Brian Hirth and John Schroeder, SmartWind Technologies, Lubbock, Texas, USA
- Category: Articles
Atmospheric Modelling Using Large-Eddy SimulationThanks to the enormous engineering successes of recent decades, wind energy is now expected to be the central pillar of the energy transition. To continue the success story, however, several grand challenges still need to be met. On the one hand, the challenges are all related to increasing scale: of wind turbines themselves, of clusters of wind farms and of the share of wind energy in the electricity system. On the other hand, the challenges stem from our limited understanding of the atmosphere: of blade aerodynamics, wake effects, interactions between the wind farm and the atmosphere, and running an entire energy system based on the weather.
By Remco Verzijlbergh, Co-founder, Whiffle, the Netherlands
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