Wind Turbines and Gearboxes

Wind turbines are an environmentally friendly energy source that can be utilized for various applications. Not only do they generate electric power, but they’re also an excellent way to reduce your carbon footprint.

Wind speed greatly influences how much power a turbine produces, so maintaining output within certain limits is essential for optimizing efficiency.

1. Optimize the Rotor Design

The rotor is the primary component of wind turbines that captures energy from the air. Its capacity for collecting wind power depends on its diameter and tip speed ratio.

The wind turbine industry has grown rapidly and is now more competitive with traditional non-renewable energy resources. To maximize their performance and reduce costs, researchers are striving to optimize the design of these devices.

Optimizing wind turbine rotor design through optimization techniques. One method involves applying BEM theory to achieve optimal blade geometries. This involves optimizing the chord and twist angle of a blade, leading to better blades with increased energy production annually.

2. Optimize the Blade Design

The blade is one of the most essential elements in a wind turbine, as it captures energy from the breeze. Therefore, optimizing its design to reduce energy costs and enhance performance should be one of your top priorities.

Wind turbine blades typically consist of a multi-layered shell structure composed of biaxial glass fibres and foam material. The foam helps reduce bending moments while increasing flexural stiffness of the blade.

When designing a wind turbine blade, many factors must be taken into consideration that could influence its structural performance. Therefore, optimization must take into account all possible parameters and their influences on the blade’s behavior.

3. Optimize the Shaft Design

One crucial part of a wind turbine system is the shaft, which connects the rotor and blade to the gearbox. When designing this component, designers must take into account volumetric and weight constraints as well as safety concerns.

The optimal shaft design is achieved through a collaborative effort that utilizes modeling and simulation tools. These simulations are then connected to an optimization algorithm run on a script.

This paper presents an optimized hollow rotor shaft design and validation through a full-scale fatigue test on Fraunhofer IWES’ main shaft fatigue test bench. The goal of this research is to save material and component costs in manufacturing the hollow rotor shaft, made from EN-GJS-400-18-LT chill cast.

4. Optimize the Gearbox Design

Wind turbines have become an increasingly popular source of clean energy in recent years, necessitating the demand for gearboxes due to factors like depleting fossil fuel sources and rising import costs.

Therefore, a robust gearbox design is necessary to guarantee that wind turbines can continue producing power even under extreme circumstances. It must be capable of withstanding heavy loads, avoiding premature wear of internal components and offering extended maintenance cycles.

SKF DuraPro offers the ideal solution, providing increased endurance life and higher bearing ratings as well as increased robustness. Furthermore, it permits larger torque densities without increasing outer raceway diameter – required for increasing turbine power output.

5. Optimize the Control System

Presently, most wind turbines are treated as independent units that can extract energy from the wind without any adverse effect on nearby turbines. Unfortunately, many wind farm installations consist of dozens or even hundreds of turbines which may interact with one another.

MIT engineers have discovered that by simulating wind flow across a group of turbines and optimizing each individual unit’s control strategy, total energy output can be increased. To do this, they developed an algorithm that doesn’t necessitate any modifications to physical turbine locations or hardware systems.