Offshore wind power production is an attractive clean energy option, but the difficulty of access can lead to expensive and rare opportunities for maintenance. As part of the Structural Health and Prognostics Management (SHPM) project at Sandia National Laboratories, smart loads management (controls) are investigated for their potential to increase the fatigue life of offshore wind turbine roto...

A support tower is the main structure which would support rotor, power transmission and control systems, and elevates the rotating blades above the earth boundary layer. A successful design should ensure safe, efficient and economic design for the whole wind turbine system. It should provide easy construction and easy access for maintenance of the rotor components and sub-components. UHPC mater...

Wind turbines reliability is affected by stochastic factors in the turbulent inflow and wind turbine structures. On one hand, the variability in wind dynamics and the inherent stochastic structures result in random loads on wind turbine rotor and tower. On the other hand, the inherent structural uncertainties caused by imperfect control of manufacturing process introduce unpredictable failures ...

ccess to an offshore wind turbine is greatly limited by the environment; consequently operation and maintenance (O&M) can become more sporadic and infrequent. This reduces the turbine availability, thus decreasing the generated output [1]. O&M is already a large part of the life costs of a turbine, but with offshore turbines, this will increase greatly with the inclusion of vessel hire costs [2...

The paper proposes a methodology for reliable design and maintenance of wind turbine rotor blades using a condition monitoring approach and a damage tolerance index coupling the material and structure. By improving the understanding of material properties that control damage propagation it will be possible to combine damage tolerant structural design, monitoring systems, inspection techniques a...

Recently, there has been a fast development and deployment of wind energy to meet the increasing electrical power demand and to limit the use of fossil fuels. More and more wind farms are planned far from shore because of good wind condition and less visual impact. This is so called offshore wind farm (OWF). In such a situation, high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission is a favorable opt...

Operation and maintenance of offshore wind farms will be more difficult and expensive than equivalent onshore wind farms. Accessibility for routine servicing and maintenance will be a concern: there may be times when the offshore wind farm is inaccessible due to sea, wind and visibility conditions. Additionally, maintenance tasks are more expensive than onshore due to: distance of the offshore ...

We derive a model for a wind turbine tower in the plane of the turbine blades, which comprises an Euler–Bernoulli beam coupled with a nacelle (rigid body) and a two-mass drive-train model (with gearbox). This model has two possible control inputs: the torque created by the electrical generator and the force created by an electrically driven mass located in the nacelle. First, we consider the ca...