Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5.3.5 The Inluence of Uncertainty on the “Danish
Concept”
Development of wind turbines touches on almost every area of
natural science and engineering. From the advanced composite
materials used in rotor blades, and the characterisation of a
turbulent and even chaotic wind resource, to the aerodynamics
associated with the rotor, to the design of the electric generator
and interface with the electric grid, to the dynamic loads
associated with the overall structure, wind turbines have been and
still are the subject of a broad set of research and development
eforts. Bringing all of these technical innovations together is the
overarching system design for a wind turbine which is inherently
complex and involves a large amount of uncertainty in terms of
the physics of the wind as well as the machine itself. This
uncertainty has had a significant impact on the history of wind
energy technology and the “Danish Concept” embodies design
principles meant to address this uncertainty.
Designing the “Danish Concept” turbine involved many
structural considerations—designing towers that would not
buckle and collapse, drive shafts that would not crack and fail,
gearboxes and other components that could handle the applied
torque, and loads translated from the rotor through the rest of
the system. Aeroelasticity involves the study or science of
aerodynamic (dynamics of air flow) forces that induce load on a
structure causing a range of response behaviours from the
structure. The term and the science are inherited from aeronautical
engineering and in particular parallels are often drawn between
wind turbine and helicopter technology. Aeroelastic codes for
wind energy design are so called because they take a technically
holistic perspective including a meteorological model of the wind
field, aerodynamic models characterising the interaction of the
wind field with the blade and the resulting forces, and structural
dynamic models which capture the efects of these forces on
the entire turbine structure as well as individual components.
Today, there exist several commercial and publically available
software packages that encompass the codes needed to do full
aeroelastic analysis in particular for horizontal-axis wind turbine
configurations of various types. However, only a few pieces of
simplified models from the current analytic suite were available
Search WWH ::
Custom Search