Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
At least 600 commercial VAWTs were operating in California in the mid-1980s,
the vast majority of these were Darrieus machines. The Flowind Corporation was
probably the most successful manufacturer of VAWTs during this period and col-
laborated with Sandia Laboratories on the development of an enhanced Darrieus
wind turbine [14] with superior aerodynamic and structural performance. By July
1995 Flowind were operating over 800 VAWTs in the Altamont and Tehachapi
passes in California. However, the company's fortunes were to take a turn for the
worse and they were bankrupt by 1997.
Canadian researchers also played a major part in the development of utility-
scale Darrieus wind turbines. A recent topic by Saulnier and Reid [15] details
some of the pioneering work carried out by engineers of the Canadian Research
Council (CNRC) and the Institut de Recherché d'Hydro-Québec (IREQ). The
devices developed and tested included the 225 kW Darrieus turbine with a rotor
24 m in diameter and 36 m in height that was installed on the Magdelen Islands in
the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1977 and operated until 1983. A number of other
research Darrieus turbines were also built and tested. A fully instrumented 50 kW
Darrieus was constructed at IREQ in 1983 by Daf-Indal (Mississauga, Ontario)
which was one of the series of commercial prototypes produced by the company
and erected in many provinces of Canada under a program of the National Research
Council of Canada [16]. However, the most signifi cant Canadian VAWT project
commenced in 1982 when IREQ, CNRC and other collaborators commenced
work on the largest VAWT ever built. This was the curved-blade Darrieus Éole
turbine rated at 4 MW with a two-bladed rotor, 96 m in height and 64 m in diam-
eter (Fig. 6). The device operated successfully for over 30,000 hr during a 5-year
(a) (b)
Figure 6: The world's largest VAWT, the Éole 4MW Darrieus turbine located at
Cap-Chat, Quebec: (a) view of the turbine as part of the Le Nordais/Cap
Chat Wind Farm [20]; (b) view of the rotor (photograph - copyright
Alain Forcione).
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