First Assess the Site, Then Build the Wind Farm

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Excerpt: Wind developers come in all sizes. For those who would like to offset their electric bills with a small turbine or two, local ordinances provide sufficient guidance and permission. But those who would like to install units capable of generating a few megawatts and more will have to do a little homew …

Simulations Key to More Efficient Wind Farms

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Excerpt: How can a wind-turbine OEM as well as their countless suppliers squeeze more power from the wind using already well  developed equipment? Even a small efficiency increase would be welcome. The viability of the business depends on it. The wind business is also counting on such gains to improv …

Shouded Wind Turbines Accelerate Output

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Excerpt: Our objective while developing wind technology is to reduce costs and increase the power output of wind turbines. The principle behind our studies is to use the effect of static wing or sail structures, which convert …

Four Onboard Generators Mean Almost Never Having to Shut Down

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Excerpt: The Liberty 2.5 MW wind turbine from Clipper Windpower, Carpenteria, Calif., is Windpower Engineering’s first Turbine of the Month because its unusual engineering features address common industry headaches, most of them in unscheduled maintenance. Downtime often comes from gearbox stresses, swappi …

Clever Bearing and Planetary Drive Carries Greater Load

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Excerpt: Uncontrollable and highly variable wind forces adversely affect the performance and reliability of planetary gears inside wind-turbine power transmissions. A couple developments from The Timken Co., Canton, Ohio, can lower maintenance on rolling elements and carry greater load in a planetary gearset …

Better Ways to Check Bolt Tension

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Excerpt: Wind turbine operations and maintenance procedures call for a 100% inspection of fastener tension after 500 hours of operation. This work is costly and can easily take a number of days to complete because each fastener is typically checked with a torque wrench to verify its proper tension. Torque i …

Capacitor Delivers High Current and Low ESR

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Excerpt: A passive components manufacturer has developed a multilayer capacitor (MLC) chip that uses a dielectric and internal electrode materials that allow for a significantly lower equivalent series resistance than previous versions. Designated the UQ Series by developer AVX Corp, the chips are wel …

Suspended Access Systems get a Safety Boost

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Excerpt: A new suspended access solution has been introduced to the windpower industry.  ThyssenKrupp Safway, Inc. has built a system that will safely enable complete external wind turbine access.  This system, the SafAscent Wind Turbine Platform, is used for turbine maintenance, repair, inspection, and cl …

CFD’s Role in the Windpower Industry

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Excerpt: Recent advances in CFD (computational fluid dynamics) codes and the availability of large scale computer “clusters” are guiding the design work of the next generation of wind turbines. Developers should be able to model a turbine’s power output versus wind velocity, and then the power output f …

Considerations for Designing Turbine Hydraulics

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Excerpt: An efficient, responsive, and reliable blade-pitch control on a wind turbine is made from many valves, pumps, hoses, reservoirs, and brakes. They must all work together to meet the demanding requirements placed on the pitch control in a turbine hub. An effective hydraulic blade-pitch control (BPC) …