Fatigue life prediction and strength degradation of wind turbine rotor blade composites

Wind turbine rotor blades are subjected to a large number of highly variable loads, but life predictions are typically based on constant amplitude fatigue behaviour. Therefore, it is important to determine how service life under variable amplitude fatigue can be estimated from constant amplitude fatigue behaviour. A life prediction contains...

Grid support by power electronic converters of distributed generation units

An increasing number of small Distributed Generation (DG) units are connected to the grid. The introduction of DG causes several problems, which are mainly related to the differences between DG units and conventional generators. Four problems have been considered in this thesis: damping of harmonics, voltage control, the behaviour of DG units...

Chances in wind energy: A probalistic approach to wind turbine fatigue design

Wind is becoming an ever more important source of renewable energy: installed wind turbine power now stands at 60,000 MW worldwide, providing 0.6% of world electricity demand. Still it is important that the cost of wind energy is brought down further, which means that wind turbines must be designed to be exactly as strong as necessary, but no...

Wind energy in the built environment: Concentrator effects of buildings

This thesis deals with wind energy conversion in the built environment. It gives a description of the wind resources in the built environment that can be converted into energy by a wind turbine. With a focus on maximum energy yield of the wind turbine, it especially deals with the integration of wind turbine and building in such a way that the...

Electricity load modelling using computational intelligence

As a consequence of the liberalisation of the electricity markets in Europe, market players have to continuously adapt their future supply to match their customers' demands. This poses the challenge of obtaining a predictive model that accurately describes electricity loads, current in this thesis. Kernel machines are considered to be the state...