as addressing potential concerns about local siting, wildlife and environmental issues. Ahmad Haidari, director of energy
industry marketing at Ansys, says: ‘As the wind and hydro turbine industry grows, it introduces advanced technology such as multi-axis designs, larger blades, gearless drives, new generators and controllers, and improved tower design.’ Furthermore, the renewable energy industry is fraught with engineering challenges due to a wide range of variables that go well beyond component design – including interactions at the system level as well as manufacturing and siting issues for both land-based and offshore systems. Traditional build-and- test approaches are expensive and time consuming, and they provide only limited insight into optimal designs. Engineering simulation software can help organisations optimise the design of the entire application, whether for a small wind turbine or a large wind-energy project.
Blowing down the barriers to
First, the big picture The structural components of turbine models are quite good and well understood, adds Jason Jonkman of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). There are more uncertainties and room for improvement in aerodynamic models, which can only be improved in concert with experimental data. The fi rst step in wind-turbine analysis
wind energy
Renewable energy is a growth market, but it presents numerous challenges concerning both technology and
the environment. Paul Schreier examines how companies in this sector are taking advantage of the latest technological aids to overcome these hurdles
A
ccording to the World Wind Energy Association, the global market for wind turbines grew robustly in the fi rst half of 2010; the total capacity
of all wind turbines installed worldwide reached 175 GW in mid-2010, compared with 159 GW by the end of 2009. Even so, it’s not growing as quickly as it could. Similarly, a study entitled 20% Wind Energy by 2030, prepared by the US Dept.
32 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
of Energy states that achieving 20 per cent wind energy will require the number of turbine installations to increase from approximately 2,000 per year in 2006 to almost 7,000 per year in 2017. Some of the major challenges along this path include the continued reduction in wind capital cost and improvement in turbine performance through technology advancement and enhanced manufacturing capabilities, as well
is to get an overall picture of the loads on various components after taking into account wind conditions and the type of operation (normal operation, startup, shutdown, fault condition). An aeroelastic program for this job evaluates the coupled physics of a turbine taking into consideration – among other things – wind infl ow, aerodynamics, the blade/tower mass/inertia and stiffness as well as control settings; the output of such a program consists of the loads and defl ections of the major components. Given overall loading data, other simulation codes are used to examine each of the wind-turbine components in more detail. So explains Jonkman, a senior engineer at NREL and lead developer of FAST, one of these high-level analysis codes for aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation, one that is distributed free of charge. Similar commercial codes include
BLADED from GL Garrad Hassan and the fi rst such code, Flex5 from the Danish Technical University. FAST is suitable for studying land- or sea-based turbines using offshore monopiles or fl oating supports and with a rigid or fl exible foundation. That code has also been evaluated by Germanischer
www.scientific-computing.com
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