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Latest Issue
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- Category: Articles
Reducing the costs of operation and maintenance offshore
ICD Projects designed a motion compensated platform following a request from the Norwegian shipowner FOB Shipping for an active heave compensated crane.- Category: Articles
The Development of an Ultra High-Performance Wind Turbine
Small wind turbines are used in situations that are quite different from those of large turbines, and it is the small turbine market that is now experiencing the entry of new companies seeking to benefit from its expected growth. While a growing market is good news, it has been argued that the levels of performance and safety need to be greatly improved, and prices drastically reduced, before small wind turbines are accepted by society in general. In this article, the author describes the concept of the Airdolphin.By Ryosuke Ito, President, Zephyr Corporation, Japan
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- Category: Articles
Prevention of Operational Hazards and Enhancing the Ongoing Maintenance
Monitoring of the condition of rotor blades is performed visually by experts every one to two years, but it is very subjective and superficial. As is common in energy facilities, the increases in stress resulting from greater blade size, coupled with the rising prices for rotor blades, call for a new approach. The continuous monitoring of the status of highly stressed parts offers preventative maintenance as well as troubleshooting of existing problems.By Dr Peter Volkmer, Managing Director, IGUS, Germany
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- Category: Articles
Issues for Planning of Offshore Wind Farms
Satellites orbiting and observing Earth offer potential for the offshore wind farm industry. Of particular interest are the images from the Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) on board satellites belonging to the European Space Agency (ESA): the satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2 from 1992 to present and Envisat from 2002 to present. In the April/May 2005 issue of Windtech International we published an article about this topic. The current article describes more specific issues concerning offshore wind farms.By Merete Bruun Christiansen, Charlotte Bay Hasager, Risø National Laboratory, Denmark and Frank Monaldo, Johns Hopkins University, USA
- Category: Articles
Utilising Energy Storage
Coupling an energy storage facility with a wind farm can improve that wind farm’s interaction with the power grid. This can be crucial, as recent estimates put the cost of integrating wind energy into the grid at 5 to 30% of the cost of generation. Energy storage can benefit wind power in many ways, including providing a balancing function for a rapidly changing load and wind output, smoothing the ramp rates so the power flows are more gradual, and providing reliable, firm output from the wind farm at any time. Sizing and choosing the correct storage technology and operational profile depends upon a number of factors – one size does not fit all.By Richard Baxter, Senior Technology Analyst, Ardour Capital Investments, USA
- Category: Articles
Design Considerations and Approaches
In the pursuit to increase the megawatts per surface area and to maximise the megawatts/hour output per project dollar the size of wind turbines has been increasing steadily. To capture the higher winds and to accommodate the larger rotor diameter the hub heights have also been steadily increasing. Wind park prospectors and promoters are now required to measure at greater heights than ever before. From 40 to 50 then to 60 metres, the minimum level now seems to be the 80-metre level. The traditional tubular anemometric masts have not been able to go beyond the 60-metre level without becoming inordinately heavy. However, by revisiting the 250-year old Euler column equations and by using the aircraft design approach, a new lightweight structure is now able to achieve the 80-metre measurement at a fraction of the cost of the traditional lattice tower.
In the pursuit to increase the megawatts per surface area and to maximise the megawatts/hour output per project dollar the size of wind turbines has been increasing steadily. To capture the higher winds and to accommodate the larger rotor diameter the hub heights have also been steadily increasing. Wind park prospectors and promoters are now required to measure at greater heights than ever before. From 40 to 50 then to 60 metres, the minimum level now seems to be the 80-metre level. The traditional tubular anemometric masts have not been able to go beyond the 60-metre level without becoming inordinately heavy. However, by revisiting the 250-year old Euler column equations and by using the aircraft design approach, a new lightweight structure is now able to achieve the 80-metre measurement at a fraction of the cost of the traditional lattice tower.By Pierre-Guy Charette, Ohmega Group, Canada
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- Turbine Shortages and Rising Costs Stall Development
- Aerodynamic Damping
- Sharing the Sea
- Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimisation
- New BAUER Flydrill system
- Investigation of Stability Effects of an Offshore Wind Turbine
- AeroBlade
- Geotechnical Analysis Requirements
- Electric Vehicles with V2G
- The Benefits of Cooperation
- The Atmospheric Vortex Engine
- Acoustical Behaviour of a Wind Turbine
- Railwind Turbine
- Computational Fluid Dynamics
- Damage to wind turbines from typhoons
- Deep Offshore Wind Farms
- Economics of Intermittent Wind Generation
- The Aeolus Project
- A New Control Concept for Offshore Wind Farms
- Offshore Potential in Japan
- The Concrete Gravity Concept
- Trends in Rotor Blade Design
- Renewable Connections on the Web
- Small Wind Turbines for Rural Areas
- How Reliable is Torque?
- Certification of Power Generation Characteristics
- Impact of Hourly Wind Power Variations
- Offshore Landing Systems
- Floating, Tilting, Multi-Rotor Turbines
- Bird Detection Radar
