Nearly two billion people worldwide have no reliable access to electricity, a vital part of the path to development. Micro wind power is one promising solution. Micro wind installations offer environmental sustainability, low capital costs, and excellent adaptability to diverse environmental and cultural situations. Yet, electrification projects in the developing world, including small-scale wi...

Condition evaluation of wind turbine blades is difficult due to their large size, complex geometry and lack of economic and scalable sensing technologies capable of detecting, localizing, and quantifying faults over a blade’s global area. A solution is to deploy inexpensive large area electronics over strategic areas of the monitored component, analogous to sensing skin. The authors have previo...

This study investigated the performance and aeroelastic characteristics of a wind turbine blade based on strongly coupled approach (two-way fluid structure interaction) to simulate the transient FSI1 responses of HAWT2. Aerodynamic response was obtained by 3D CFD-URANS approach and structural response was obtained by 3D Finite element method. Aeroelastic responses of the blade were obtained by ...

The effect of the blade tip geometry of a high pressure gas turbine is studied experimentally and computationally for high speed leakage flows. For this purpose two simplified models are constructed, one models a flat tip of the blade and the second models a cavity tip of the blade. Experimental results are obtained from a transonic wind tunnel to show the static pressure distribution along the...

The most common controller in wind turbine is the blade pitch angle control in order to get the desired power. Controlling the pitch angle in wind turbines has a direct impact on the dynamic performance of the machine and fluct­uat­io­ns in the power systems. Due to constant changes in wind speed, the wind turbines are of nonlinear and multivariate system. The design of a controller that can ad...

This paper presents a robust crack detection algorithm for wind turbine blades using vibroacoustic modulation and the area under the curve of the frequency spectrum of the sidebands. In a previous paper it was shown how the operational vibration of the turbine could be used as a pumping signal in vibro-acoustic modulation. However, the sources of the operational vibration frequencies are many a...

The use of a shroud around the rotor of a wind turbine has been known to augment the airflow through the rotor plane and hence result in improved performance. This work uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to assess the validity of several simple theories which attempt to extend Betz theory to shrouded turbines. Two CFD models are employed and compared to predictions of previously published ...

As part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Partnerships for Advanced Component Technologies (WindPACT) program, Global Energy Concepts LLC (GEC) is performing a study concerning innovations in materials, processes and structural configurations for application to wind turbine blades in the multimegawatt range. The project team for this work includes experts in all areas of wind turbine blad...

Advances in wind turbine technology have allowed the machines to take advantage of economies of scale. The increased size and power requirements of modern turbines have presented new challenges to the more expensive components, particularly the gearboxes. This paper focused on a new control system for wind turbines in above-rated, or Region 3, wind regimes. The control goals were to regulate th...