Development of an interface between a plunger and an eccentric running track for a low-speed seawater pump

The DOT concept for offshore wind energy is a seawater hydraulic network where turbines are directly coupled to a centralized hydro-power platform. The essential missing component is a low-speed hydraulic pump that uses seawater as its hydraulic medium. This low speed hydraulic pump is currently being designed and tested by DOT, where novel...

Centralized electricity generation in offshore wind farms using hydraulic networks

The work presented in this thesis explores a new way of generation, collection and transmission of wind energy inside a wind farm, in which the electrical conversion does not occur during any intermediate conversion step before the energy has reached the offshore central platform. A centralized approach for electricity generation is considered...

On the Application of Fluid Power Transmission in Offshore Wind Turbines

Offshore wind energy is currently characterized by the high costs associated with installation and operation. Gearboxes in particular have been singled out as a key source of the high maintenance costs of offshore wind farms. For a given wind speed, the torque of the rotor increases cubically with the diameter of its swept area. As the maximum...

Dynamic Analysis of Fluid Power Drive-trains for Variable Speed Wind Turbines: A Parameter Study

In the pursuit of making wind energy technology more economically attractive, the application of fluid power technology for the transmission of wind energy is being developed by several parties all over the world. This paper presents a dynamic model of a fluid power transmission for variable speed wind turbines and shows a parametric study on...

Water-hydraulic power transmission for offshore wind farms

The current state of the art of offshore wind turbine power transmission technology is expensive, heavy and maintenance intensive. The Delft Offshore Turbine project considers a radically new concept for power transmission in an offshore wind farm: using seawater as power transmission medium. For this project, small scale experiments have been...