Recently, there has been a rapidly growing demand for renewable energy, including wind energy. To meet this demand, wind turbine designers are forever looking at solutions to withstand inertial forces, aerodynamic forces, and structural forces so as to provide a relatively long service life and safe operation. Like all rotating machines, wind turbines are generators of fatigue, and every revolution of its components including the turbine blades produces a load or fatigue cycle, with each of these cycles causing a small, finite amount of damage that eventually may lead to fatigue cracks or other failures. This is why it’s imperative that turbines are continually improved and developed as time goes on, to ensure that they remain able to withstand pressure, as well as continuing to drive efficiency. There are a number of important innovations emerging to make turbine manufacturing easier and cheaper:
Size
Perhaps the biggest challenge is to create a rotor blade longer than 650 feet for a 50-MW offshore wind turbine. That's 2.5X longer and over 6X more output than the largest blades and turbines now in operation, substantially reducing stress and fatigue on rotor blades, making it more structurally and economically feasible.
Manufacturing
The challenge is making larger and taller - but not heavier or costlier - turbines that are no less effective and can withstand the wind stresses that longer blades would encounter. The suggestion is to make the bigger blades lighter to lessen aerodynamic and gravity loads on the other turbine components, like the drivetrain, and lessen materials costs.
Gearbox, Hub and Foundation
Where other turbine components are concerned, new gearbox technologies that replace roller bearings with journal bearings - would improve gearbox reliability and lifespan and reduce size and weight - using flex pins to increase load sharing between gears in a sun/planet configuration.
Assessment
Light Detection and Radar (LIDAR) technology has the potential to migrate calculation of a wind farm's potential energy yield away from fixed steel met masts by giving a more detailed picture of the wind resource over a larger portion of the wind site. The economic implications are enormous, since wind measurement accounts for about 45 percent of an average wind farm's overall project cost.
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the next generation of wind power is on its way