Multidisciplinary design optimization of large wind turbines: Technical, economic, and design challenges

Wind energy has experienced a continuous cost reduction in the last decades. A popular cost reduction technique is to increase the rated power of the wind turbine by making it larger. However, it is not clear whether further upscaling of the existing wind turbines beyond the 5–7MW range is technically feasible and economically attractive. To...

Yaw-misalignment and its impact on wind turbine loads and wind farm power output

To make wind energy cost competitive with traditional resources, wind turbines are commonly placed in groups. Aerodynamic interaction between the turbines causes sub-optimal energy production. A control strategy to mitigate these losses is by redirecting the wake by yaw misalignment. This paper aims to assess the influence of load variations of...

Integrated Multidisciplinary Constrained Optimization of Offshore Support Structures

In the current offshore wind turbine support structure design method, the tower and foundation, which form the support structure are designed separately by the turbine and foundation designer. This method yields a suboptimal design and it results in a heavy, overdesigned and expensive support structure. This paper presents an integrated...

Beyond Classical Upscaling: Integrated Aeroservoelastic Design and Optimization of Large Offshore Wind Turbines

Issues related to environmental concern and fossil fuel exhaustion has made wind energy the most widely accepted renewable energy resource. However, there are still several challenges to be solved such as the integrated design of wind turbines, aeroelastic response and stability prediction, grid integration, offshore resource assessment and...

Influence of Nonlinear Irregular Waves on the Fatigue Loads of an Offshore Wind Turbine

In order to make offshore wind power a cost effective solution that can compete with the traditional fossil energy sources, cost reductions on the expensive offshore support structures are required. One way to achieve this, is to reduce the uncertainty in wave load calculations by using a more advanced model for wave kinematics. As offshore wind...

Applying the shuffled frog-leaping algorithm to improve scheduling of construction projects with activity splitting allowed

In situation of contractors competing to finish a given project with the least duration and cost, acquiring the ability to improve the project quality properties seems essential for project managers. Evolutionary Algorithm (EAs) have been applied as suitable algorithms to develop the multi-objective Time-Cost trade-off Optimization (TCO) and...

A real options approach to evaluating investment in solar ready buildings

Sustainable building technologies such as Photovoltaics (PV) have promising features for energy saving and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction in the building sector. Nevertheless, adopting these technologies generally requires substantial initial investments. Moreover, the market for these technologies is often very vibrant from the...

A Non-Linear Upscaling Approach for Wind Turbines Blades Based on Stresses

The linear scaling laws for upscaling wind turbine blades show a linear increase of stresses due to the weight. However, the stresses should remain the same for a suitable design. Application of linear scaling laws may lead to an upscaled blade that may not be any more a feasible design. In this paper a non-linear upscaling approach is presented...

Controller Design Automation for Aeroservoelastic Design Optimization of Wind Turbines

The purpose of this paper is to integrate the controller design of wind turbines with structure and aerodynamic analysis and use the final product in the design optimization process (DOP) of wind turbines. To do that, the controller design is automated and integrated with an aeroelastic simulation tool. This integrated tool is linked with an...

An Analytical Model to Extract Wind Turbine Blade Structural Properties for Optimization and Up-scaling Studies

A wind turbine blade has a complex shape and consists of different elements with dissimilar material properties. To do any aeroelastic simulation, the structural properties of the blade such as stiffnesses and mass per unit length should be known in advance, and extracting these properties is a difficult task. This paper presents an analytical...

Dynamic modeling of a spar-type floating offshore wind turbine

The installation of floating wind farms in deeper water is encouraged by the stronger and steadier wind, the lower visibility and noise impact, the absence of road restrictions, but also the absence or shortage of shallow water. In the summer of 2009, the first large-scale floating wind turbine ”Hywind” was installed. Hywind is a spar-buoy...

Size effect on wind turbine blade's design drivers

The future of offshore wind turbines

Review of design concepts, methods and considerations of offshore wind turbines