What can you do with a place that is flat as pancake, endures heat, cold, and dust storms, and sports an average wind speed of 8.2 m/sec? Make it an independent test facility for wind turbines, solar panels, and utility scale batteries, of course. “And then work to get all three power sources to provide…
Acoustic emission measurements promise better composite-blade damage analysis
Wind turbine blades continue to grow in length to capture ever more energy. To maintain the economics of this scaling, designers must drive towards minimizing the blade mass while retaining the same reliability in performance. This requires ever more detailed understanding of the response of composite materials under various loading conditions, including damage initiation and…
Ideas from Sandia: Optimizing the wind plant
The Sandia Wake Imaging System (SWIS) is being developed to improve the spatial and temporal resolution capabilities of velocity measurements within wind farms. These high-resolution velocity measurements are needed to provide the necessary data for validating high-fidelity simulations. SWIS uses a technology (explained thoroughly in a previous report) where the velocity component measured and quality…
Sandia Lab’s National Rotor Testbed selects new turbine rotor for SWIFT project
This article was excerpted from Sandia’s Wind and Water Power Technologies Program Newsletter and republished with permission. The National Rotor Testbed team has been looking into the effect of airfoil choice on the final design of the new rotor for SWiFT, Sandia National Labs Scaled Wind Farm Technology. The airfoil family would ideally be designed to…
Teaching wind turbines and radar to play nice
Sandia National Laboratories and MIT Lincoln Laboratory recently concluded a 7-day field-test campaign in the Tyler, Minn. region to evaluate a long-range radar and other technologies developed to mitigate the effect of wind turbines on radar systems. This test is a follow on to the Interagency Field Test & Evaluation (IFT&E) tests that were conducted…
Sandia and NREL collaborate on the impact of tip speed constraints on wind turbine design and plant cost of energy
NREL and Sandia recently published two reports on their collaborative effort to study the effects of increased maximum allowable blade tip velocities on overall system cost and performance. The maximum rotor rotation speed for utility-scale wind turbines is generally constricted by noise considerations. Even so, innovations in acoustics or siting in remote locations or both…
Sandia study takes costs out of wind turbine blades
Sandia National Laboratories is helping makers of wind turbine blades improve the labor productivity associated with blade fabrication and finishing. This improved productivity makes domestic blades more cost competitive with blades from countries that pay workers lower wages. The Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Initiative (AMII), a three-year $6.3 million project, brought together researchers from Sandia, Iowa…
CFD simulations give insight to rotor designs
One of the primary roles of Sandia’s Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) test site will be to conduct detailed experiments on turbine wakes and investigate how those wakes interact with nearby turbines. Although the SWiFT turbines are somewhat smaller than MW-scale turbines deployed today, Sandia would like the SWiFT turbines, and their wakes, to behave…
Sandia study of offshore wind-structure health and prognostics management
Sandia is continuing its development of rotor-based offshore Structural Health and Prognostics Management (SHPM) with Vanderbilt’s Laboratory for Systems Integrity and Reliability (LASIR). In 2012, a multi-scale modeling approach was used to identify how rotor dynamics are affected by pitch error, mass imbalance, and shear-web disbond – detection methods for these conditions were developed and…
Update on smart blade-load management and maintenance ideas
Smart loads management strategies for mitigating damage in blades is being studied by Phillip Richards of the Georgia Institute of Technology as part of Sandia Lab’s Offshore Structural Health and Prognostics Management project. As an alternative to shutting a turbine down once blade damage is detected, a load mitigating control strategy lets the turbine continue…
Latest version of Composite Materials Database available for download
Since 1989, Sandia National Laboratories has partnered with Montana State University to test and report key data and trends of fiber-reinforced polymers (composites) and other materials used in the construction of wind turbine blades. The average wind turbine installed in 1989 had a power rating of 0.225 MW and a rotor diameter of 27m. By…
Science of Making Torque from Wind Conference Presentations: Offshore Vertical-axis Wind Turbine and Structural Health Monitoring
Todd Griffith, Brian Owens, and Phillip Richards traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark for the Science of Making Torque from Wind Conference (June 18 to 20, 2014).Three proceedings papers were presented. Phillip Richards (a PhD student at Georgia Tech) gave an oral presentation for the paper titled “High-fidelity Modeling of Local Effects of Damage for Derated Offshore…
What happens to sub-structures & cables on the seafloor? Sandia examines
A key risk driver in Offshore Wind (OW) projects is the potentially detrimental interaction between OW sub-structures and cables, and the seafloor. In previous years Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) developed methods for the evaluation of regional sediment stability with the use of combined wave, circulation, and sediment dynamics modeling. Knowledge of sediment stability not only…
Materials, reliability, & standards blade reliability collaborative
The Blade Reliability Collaborative (BRC) has focused recently on inspection methods to find flaws and damage in blades, and the effect of those defects on structural and aerodynamic performance. Additionally, the project has started a new effort looking at repair methods. Researchers at Sandia have completed design and manufacturing of non-destructive inspection (NDI) test panels…
CACTUS Improvements allow In-depth investigation of how rotor design affects wake character
As part of the National Rotor Testbed (NRT), new capability has been incorporated into the Sandia developed wind-turbine free-wake vortex code, CACTUS. Previously, only revolution-averaged velocity data could be output from the simulation. Now, the vortex elements and the induced velocity can be output as time series, enabling the calculation of turbulence statistics. This new…
Wake-imaging system begins scaled field test
Development of the Wake Imaging System is underway at Sandia applying the Planar Doppler Velocimetry (PDV) technique over a larger area and at lower speeds than previously attempted with the goal of measuring the velocity in the wake of wind turbines at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility. As a major step in the…
NREL, Sandia team to improve hydrogen fueling infrastructure
Editor’s note: This article should be of interest to the wind industry because the hydrogen needed by fuel cell vehicles will likely be from electrolysis, and the dc power to drive the electrolyzers will most efficiently come from wind generated power. A new project led by the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and…
Overview of a wake imaging system
Wind turbine wakes lead to lower power production and increased loading on downstream turbines from the reduced incoming velocity and increased turbulence contained within the wakes. Detailed measurement will improve the understanding of the wakes needed to improve wake modeling and consequently support reducing cost of energy (COE) at the plant level. Sandia National Lab…
GE, Sandia National Lab discover pathway to quieter, more productive wind turbines
GE Global Research, the technology development arm of the General Electric Co., has announced research that could significantly impact the design of future wind turbine blades. Using the power of high-performance computing (HPC) to perform complex calculations, GE engineers have overcome previous design constraints, allowing them to begin exploring ways to design reengineered wind blades…
Complex wind flows finally giving up their secrets
Steering turbine wakes by controlling yaw and seeing real-time measurements of wind flow through a wind farm are just two ideas and developments from Sandia’s recent reliability workshop. The complex interactions of wind with many turbines across a large wind farm are not difficult to imagine but a dickens to confirm. During one session at…