large blade testing facility large wind turbines
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Large Blade Testing FacilityLARGE WIND TURBINES
Rahul YaralaExecutive Director, Wind Technology Testing Center
May 12, 2011
WHY OFFSHORE WIND?
• Resource near load centers• Minimize greenhouse gas emissions from
electricity generation• Minimal water consumption for electricity
generation• Energy Independence• Green Jobs and local economic
development
• Higher Capacity Factors• Low shear and turbulence• Higher wind speeds• Turbines can spin at higher tip speeds
and hence higher energy production
A POWERFUL RESOURCE IN US
WHY LARGER TURBINES?
CHALLENGES and OPPORTUNITIES
• Rotor Blade Structure• New materials• Two-piece• Larger Chords
• New Tower concepts• Composite materials• Lighter and corrosion resistance
• Drivetrain• Direct drive or low speed
• Foundations
• Corrosion protection
• Site specific wind data collection and correlation with mesoscale weather prediction models for wind assessment.
• Further research and data collection using newer offshore friendly technology like LIDAR, SODAR etc… is very important
• Demonstration platforms or prototype farms are required for offshore wind specific technology development and long term cost competitiveness of offshore wind. This is similar to land based turbine testing at NREL and UK’s (public-private) initiative to have 100MW offshore wind farm available for prototyping and testing.
CHALLENGES and OPPORTUNITIES
• Static strength testing and accelerated fatigue testing of wind turbine blades are required for • Turbine certification
• Reduce the risk of widespread failures
• Improve blade reliability• Reduce COE
• Blades over 50m can not be fatigue tested in the United States
• Blades 62m long are in production and longer blades are being designed
• This project will reduce COE by • Reducing frequency of blade failures
• Lowering machine cost
• Introducing more efficient blades
• Reducing technical and financial risk of large-scale deployment
• Providing industry with low cost test facilities to comply with certification requirements and support value engineering
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1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
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NWTC IUF Blade Test Facility built for blades up to 34m
NWTC Blade Test Facility modified to test blades up to 50m
.1 MW
.5 MW
.75 MW
3.6 MW
5 MW
1.5 MW
7 MW
BLADES - Statement of the Problem
Slide courtesy of Jason Cotrell of NREL
Development of Test Equipment• Procuring a state of the art hydraulic based static test system from MTS• Working with MTS to scale up NREL UREX Fatigue Test System• Designing and procuring a new generation of the NREL data acquisition hardware• Developing a new version of data acquisition software
Schematic of MTS Static Test SystemCourtesy of MTS website
Technical Approach
Slide courtesy of Jason Cotrell of NREL
Picture courtesy of MTS and NREL
Static and Fatigue Testing
•Latest hydraulic actuators/winches will allow matching various specified bending moment distributions.
•Dual-axis resonant test system (NREL patent pending)
THANK YOU
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