SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “wind industry”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 73 records · Page 4

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

DOE OSTI2023

Wind Plant Operations and Maintenance Challenges and Research Opportunities

Global wind industry has experienced tremendous growth during the past two decades and the trend does not appear changing in near future. However, the industry is still challenged by premature component failures and high operations & maintenance (O&M) costs, which can account for up to 35% of levelized cost of energy. It is imperative for the industry to improve performance, reliability and reduce O&M costs through advanced technologies, enabled by research in related disciplines, to be competitive. This talk will first briefly discuss the challenges with wind plant O&M, then give an overview of related NREL research in the areas of performance, reliability, and O&M cost modeling, finally touch on future R&D opportunities in related areas. The authors hope some of these challenges are of interested to and can be addressed by the INFORMS community in future.

costs↗

DOE OSTI2023

FERC Order No. 2222 and Considerations for Distributed Wind

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order No. 2222 in October 2020. The rule directs Regional Transmission Organizations and Independent System Operators (ISOs) to amend their tariffs and participation models to accommodate heterogeneous distributed energy resource (DER) aggregations in the wholesale energy markets that they operate, including capacity, energy, and ancillary service markets. The Commission issued the rule to better capture the benefits provided by DERs deployed in the United States, whose use has been expanding rapidly. The Commission defines DERs as “any resource located on the distribution system, any subsystem thereof or behind a customer meter,” including but not limited to “electric storage resources, distributed generation, demand response, energy efficiency, thermal storage, and electric vehicles and their supply equipment.” The rule aims to increase DER participation in wholesale markets by allowing the creation of DER aggregations, in which multiple DERs that are too small to meet minimum capacity requirements for wholesale markets individually would be able to participate in markets as a single unit. As of June 20, 2023, all ISOs have filed initial compliance plans and a number have begun implementation. Compliance dates range from 2024 to 2029, with Midcontinent ISO having the latest date of compliance proposed for 2029. Southwest Power Pool still has an outstanding date, having no final order yet from FERC, but a target date of the third quarter of calendar year 2025. The rule, which is technology agnostic and requires ISOs to create participation plans that accommodate different DERs, provides an opportunity for distributed wind market expansion. In addition, distributed wind can bring benefits to heterogenous DER aggregations. These benefits include resource diversity (i.e., a complementary generation profile to other types of distributed generation), its small footprint and ability to be co-located with load, and its potential to provide frequency response, voltage support, and black start services, among other ancillary services. This report provides a status update on FERC Order No. 2222, the current state of ISO compliance, and information relevant to the distributed wind industry as DER aggregators and other stakeholders expand their participation to wholesale energy markets.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Protonic Ceramics for Energy Storage & Electricity Generation with Ammonia (Final Report)

The commercial product resulting from this R&D project will enable cost-effective synthesis of the Carbon Neutral Liquid Fuel (CNLF) ammonia, a common chemical, at a small scale for energy and industrial applications using only intermittent renewable energy, water, and air as feedstocks. These products are also capable of producing electrical energy from the CNLF in a fuel cell mode of operation. Thus, the eventual commercial product enables both single direction production of either CLNF or electricity, or alternatively functions as a fully reversible, self-contained energy storage device. The renewed interest in developing electrolysis systems is driven, in part, by the burgeoning renewable, solar, and wind industries and the need for an energy conversion and storage technology that can convert intermittent solar and wind energy into the production of hydrogen. Electrolysis systems integrated into both distributed and central renewable power plants would utilize solar and wind energy as their primary power source to produce renewably generated hydrogen for local energy storage or chemical feedstock purposes. Ammonia is an excellent surrogate for hydrogen transportation. NH3 presents an attractive alternative to hydrogen as a working fluid in reversible devices towards a sustainable green energy-oriented future. Ammonia can be easily liquefied at room temperature at about 8 bar or at -33°C at ambient pressure. In contrast, the liquefaction temperature of hydrogen is -253°C at ambient pressure. NH3 has a significantly higher volumetric energy density (12.7 MJ/L) than compressed hydrogen (4.5 MJ/L at ~70 MPa) or liquefied hydrogen (8.5 MJ/L). Additionally, ammonia is a widely used raw material for agriculture fertilizer and thus has well-established storage, transport, and handling processes (about 180 million tons of ammonia are produced annually). Techno-economic analysis suggests ammonia is the least expensive fuel among hydrogen, gasoline, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, and methanol.

08 HYDROGEN↗

DOE OSTI2022

Offshore Wind Market Report: 2022 Edition

The 2022 edition of the Offshore Wind Market Report provides offshore wind policymakers, regulators, developers, researchers, engineers, financiers, supply chain participants, and other stakeholders with up-to-date quantitative information about the offshore wind market, technology, and cost trends in the United States and worldwide. The report covers the global offshore wind industry for the 2021 calendar year and the most significant U.S. domestic industry progress and events from January 1, 2021, through May 31, 2022.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

Offshore Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition

The Offshore Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition is intended to provide offshore wind policymakers, regulators, developers, researchers, engineers, financiers, supply chain participants, and other stakeholders with up-to-date quantitative information about the offshore wind market, technology, and cost trends in the United States and worldwide. This report details information on the domestic offshore wind industry to provide a U.S. context and help navigate technical and market barriers and opportunities.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

The DG03: An Outline of Suggested Changes

The Design Guideline 03 (DG03) published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2009 is widely used in the wind industry. It allows engineers to get acquainted with design aspects and methodologies to determine pitch and yaw bearing static capacity and fatigue life. The combination of the detailed theoretical descriptions and practical examples makes it a highly application-oriented document. Since its publication, the knowledge about oscillating bearings, slewing bearings, and wind turbines has grown significantly. Some aspects of the DG03 need updates to reflect the current state of the art. This work covers proposed changes for an upcoming revision of DG03.

design guideline↗

DOE OSTI2023

The Wind Turbine Design Guideline DG03: Yaw and Pitch Rolling Bearing Life Revisited - An Outline of Suggested Changes: Preprint

design guideline↗

DOE OSTI2022

The impacts of COVID-19 on clean energy labor markets: Evidence from multifaceted analysis of public health interventions and COVID-health factors

COVID-19 pandemic has affected clean energy labor market. Using real-time job vacancy data, this study analyzes the impacts of the pandemic on the U.S. clean energy labor market in 2020, including biomass, energy efficiency (EE), electric vehicle (EV), power/microgrid, solar, and wind industries. This study identifies how COVID-health factors and public health interventions influence clean energy job availability during the early COVID pandemic. Overall, California had the most energy jobs and experienced a significant decrease in April 2020. EV and solar had the highest percentages of job vacancies during the pandemic in general. Still, lockdowns had the most severe influence on EE and wind jobs. Stay-at-home orders negatively affected clean energy job vacancies in biomass, EV, power/microgrid, and wind. Social-gathering restrictions, however, did not have much influence. Increased COVID tests at the state level had the strongest and most positive influence on clean energy job postings, indicating the importance of a state's ability to manage public health infrastructure or crisis issues. COVID hospitalizations negatively influenced the job vacancies in biomass and wind but did not affect the other four sectors; conversely, as COVID death numbers increased, the number of jobs in biomass, EV, power grid, solar, and wind decreased, but not in EE jobs.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Technology Acceptance Workshop Meeting Proceedings, April 20-29, 2022

The Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory convened a virtual workshop facilitated by the Consensus Building Institute in April 2022 to identify recommendations on how to accelerate the rate of research and development, evaluation, and adoption of technologies for monitoring or minimizing wildlife impacts from wind energy. The workshop drew on expertise from stakeholder groups including technology developers, federal agencies, conservation nonprofits, and the wind industry. Over the course of four sessions, participants discussed incentives and barriers to technology development beginning with early field testing and validation, through full-scale experimental deployment, and finally broad-scale acceptance and commercial deployment.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

wtDigiTwin (Wind Turbine Digital Twin) [SWR-21-15]

This wind turbine digital twin software (wtDigiTwin) provides a digital twin solution for wind turbine applications. The focus of wtDigiTwin is to estimate loads, motions and environmental conditions for an operating wind turbine. The program uses supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) measurements as inputs, together with a wind turbine model. The wind industry is currently challenged by the high cost of operation and maintenance. These costs could be mitigated if component failures are predicted, but such predictions are difficult unless the turbines are equipped with expensive measuring devices. The alternative is to use a digital twin such as wtDigiTwin to estimate the necessary signals. wtDigiTwin can perform online prediction of signals that are otherwise not measured, using a limited set of reliable measurements and a physics-based model. The predicted signals can be used in applications that have direct cost benefits: 1) real-time estimation of the fatigue consumption of key components of the wind turbine; 2) root cause analyses and failure detections ; 3) lifetime reassessments ; 4) improvements to follow-on designs. The current version provides examples to estimate wind speed, thrust, torque, tower-top position, and tower loads on an onshore wind turbine using the following measurements tower top acceleration, generator torque, pitch, and rotational speed. The model combines a linear state-space model, a wind speed estimator, and a Kalman filter algorithm that integrates measurements with the state model to perform state estimations. The state space model is obtained either using OpenFAST linearizations, or using the yams package provided with the software.

Branlard, Emmanuel↗

DOE OSTI2023

A Study of Wake Characteristics of Marine Turbine Arrays: Preprint

As the marine energy industry continues to develop and installations grow from single turbines to small arrays and larger farms, understanding and predicting wake behavior using modeling tools is necessary for array design and optimization. The wake characteristics of upstream turbines, including velocity deficit, wake swirling, tip vortices, wake shape and direction, and flow recovery, influence the inflow conditions experienced by downstream turbines in an array and, subsequently, affect the individual turbine loading and power generated by the array. These wake characteristics are influenced by many factors, including site geography, inflow shear profile, turbulence, waves, the strength of the current resource, gravitational forces, storm surges, and seasonal effects like temperature and wind conditions. Efficient array modeling tools that capture these wake effects and resulting turbine-to-turbine interactions need to be developed to optimize farm layouts and design individual turbines for operation within arrays. Unlike the wind industry, the marine energy research community is largely limited to the use of either numerical tools or tank/flume testing to understand marine turbine wake interactions. This paper will investigate recent advances in numerical and experimental marine turbine wake modeling, with a focus on recent publications and on both axial-flow and cross-flow marine turbines. A summary of recent research on these topics is provided. Additionally, a demonstration of turbine wake interactions using computational fluid dynamics is presented.

marine hydrokinetic turbine↗

DOE OSTI2023

Optimized Carbon Fiber Composites in Wind Turbine Blade Design: Follow-On Studies

This project has identified opportunities to bring further reductions in the mass and cost of modern wind turbine blades through the use of alternative material systems and manufacturing processes. The fiber reinforced polymer material systems currently used by the wind industry have stagnated as the technology continues to mature and as a means to reduce risk while introducing new products with continually increasing blade lengths. However, as blade lengths continue to increase, the challenge of controlling blade mass becomes even more critical to enabling the associated levelized cost of energy reductions. Stiffer and stronger reinforcement fibers can help to resolve the challenges of meeting the loading demands while limiting the increase in weight, but these materials are substantially more expensive than the traditional E-glass fiber systems. One goal of this project and associated work is to identify pathways that improve the cost-effectiveness of carbon fiber such that it is the reinforcement of choice in the primary structural elements of wind blades. The use of heavy-tow textile carbon fiber material systems has been shown to reduce the blade mass by 30-31% when used in the spar cap and by up to 7% when used in edgewise reinforcement. A pultrusion cost model was developed to enable a material cost comparison that includes an accurate estimate of the intermediate manufacturing step of pultrusion for the carbon fiber composite. Material cost reductions were revealed in most cases for the heavy-tow textile carbon fiber compared to infused fiberglass. The use of carbon fiber in the edgewise reinforcement produced the most notable material cost reduction of 33% for the heavy-tow textile carbon fiber. The mass and cost savings observed when using carbon fiber in edgewise reinforcement demonstrate a clear opportunity of this design approach. A carbon fiber conversion cost model was expanded to include a characterization of manufacturing costs when using advanced conversion processes with atmospheric plasma oxidation. This manufacturing approach was estimated to reduce the cost of carbon fiber material systems by greater than 10% and can be used with textile carbon systems or traditional carbon fiber precursors. The pultrusion cost model was also used to assess the opportunity for using pultruded fiberglass in wind blades, studying conventional E-glass fiber reinforcement. When using pultruded fiberglass as the spar cap material for two design classifications, the blade weight was reduced by 6% and 9% compared to infused fiberglass. However, due to the relatively large share of the pultrusion manufacturing cost compared to fiber cost, the spar cap material cost increased by 12% and 7%. When considering the system benefits of reduced blade mass and potentially lower blade manufacturing costs for pultruded composites, there may be opportunity for pultruded E-glass in wind blade spar caps, but further studies are needed. There is a clearer outcome for using pultruded fiberglass in the edgewise reinforcement where it resulted in a blade mass reduction of 2% and associated reinforcement material cost reduction of 1% compared to infused E-glass. The use of higher performing glass fibers, such as S-glass and H-glass systems, will produce greater mass savings but a study is needed to assess the cost implications for these more expensive systems. The most likely opportunity for these high-performance glass fibers is in the edgewise reinforcement, where the increased strength will reduce the damage accumulation of this fatigue-driven component. The blade design assessments in this project characterize the controlling material properties for the primary structural components in the flapwise and edgewise directions for modern wind blades. The observed trends with low and high wind speed turbine classifications for carbon and glass fiber reinforced polymer systems help to identify where cost reductions are needed, and where improvements in mechanical properties would help to reduce the material demands.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Economic competitiveness of pultruded fiber composites for wind turbine applications

Pultrusion manufacturing of fiber reinforced polymers has been shown to yield some of the highest mechanical properties for unidirectional composites, having a high degree of fiber alignment with consistent performance. Pultrusions offer a low-cost manufacturing approach for producing unidirectional composites with a constant cross-section and are used in many applications, including spar caps of wind turbine blades. However, as an intermediate processing step for wind blades, the additional cost of manufacturing pultrusions must be accompanied by sufficient increases in mechanical performance and system benefits. Wind turbine blades are manufactured using vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding with infused unidirectional fiberglass or carbon pultrusions for the spar cap. Infused fiberglass composites are among the most cost-effective structural materials available and replacing this material in the cost-driven wind industry has proven challenging, where infused fiberglass spar caps are still the predominant material system in use. To evaluate alternative material systems in a pultruded composite form, it is necessary to understand the costs for this additional manufacturing step which are shown to add 33%–55% on top of the material costs. A pultrusion cost model has been developed and used to quantify cost sensitivities to various processing parameters. The mechanical performance for pultruded composites is improved versus resin-infusion manufacturing with a 17% increase in design strength at a constant fiber volume fraction, but also enables higher achievable fiber volume fractions. The cost-specific mechanical performance is compared as a function of processing parameters for pultruded composites to identify the opportunities for alternative material and manufacturing approaches for wind turbine spar caps. Finally, four materials are compared in a representative wind turbine blade model to assess the performance of pultruded carbon fiber systems and pultruded fiberglass relative to infused fiberglass, where the pultruded systems produce lower weight blades with various cost distinctions.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2025

Winds of fortune? Understanding the geographic, sociodemographic, and temporal distribution of benefit mechanisms from land-based wind projects in the United States

Despite decades of research on factors shaping local responses to wind development, there is relatively little known about benefit mechanisms (e.g., agreements, funds, donations) used by developers in the U.S. land-based wind sector. To address this gap, we collected benefit mechanism data across all current utility-scale land-based wind projects installed between 1982 and 2024 (n = 1047), finding that just under one-third of projects had a benefit mechanism attached to them. We find the use of benefit mechanisms has become more common over time, is associated with larger projects, and varies by region. In terms of host community characteristics, the use of benefit mechanisms is associated with characteristics like higher education level, higher percent white, higher percent Republican, higher decision-making capacity, lower unemployment rate, and higher poverty rate. Building on a theoretical framework of purposes, we discuss what these findings could suggest about the motivations driving developers' use of these mechanisms, such as increasing local acceptance of a wind project or supporting distributive fairness. This first-of-its-kind study builds a comprehensive understanding of how benefit mechanisms have been used in the U.S. wind industry throughout its history, which can inform future approaches to benefit-sharing across sectors.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Design and Modeling of an Open-Source Baseline Floating Marine Turbine: Preprint

Marine energy resources such as river, tidal, and ocean currents can provide abundant, predictable, and clean power to both densely populated and remote communities globally. However, marine turbine technologies are still in an early stage of development. Recently, features have been added to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's open-source wind turbine modeling tool OpenFAST to support the simulation of axial-flow marine turbines. These new features enable marine energy developers to predict the performance and safety of their turbines and allow researchers and students to advance the field through the exploration of novel designs. Developing and demonstrating the new capabilities of OpenFAST for marine turbines requires a baseline design that can be used as an example and test case. There are limited open-source turbine models suitable for this purpose. One existing baseline design is the Reference Model 1 (RM1), a fixed-bottom, dual-rotor marine turbine that was published in 2014 as part of the Department of Energy's Water Power Reference Model Project. To test and demonstrate OpenFAST's ability to model floating marine turbines, several modifications were made to the RM1. A floating platform and mooring system were designed to support a single RM1 rotor in a wide range of possible current and wave conditions. The system and model are intended to be a stable reference case and starting point for research efforts. The platform features all cylindrical members and familiar design elements from the offshore wind industry; the mooring system uses simple catenary chains. While not optimized for the lowest platform cost, the design is understandable and robust and can serve as a baseline for floating marine turbine technologies. This is a useful starting point for studies to explore new technologies or design methodologies. Additionally, the floating RM1 design enables cross-collaboration among industry, academia, and national lab researchers and serves as an educational platform for newcomers to marine energy. This short paper presents the specifications of the turbine, including its floating support structure and mooring system. The rationale behind the selection of certain design parameters is described. To enable adoption of this baseline case for research and educational efforts, an OpenFAST model of the full system has been made publicly available at https://github.com/OpenFAST/r-test/tree/main/glue-codes/openfast/MHK_RM1_Floating.

floating↗

DOE OSTI2024

Fatigue performance of the Deeply Embedded Ring Anchor

Existing anchor solutions are limited in their applicability to the floating offshore wind industry, which demands prolonged load endurance in extreme weather conditions and varied seabed soils. This limitation restricts project feasibility and increases costs. In order to address these challenges, the Deeply Embedded Ring Anchor (DERA) is proposed to achieve substantial reductions in anchor costs through efficiency enhancements. Ensuring the long-term safety and reliability of the DERA, especially considering a minimum operational period of 25 years, necessitates a comprehensive understanding of fatigue damage. Induced by repetitive loading below material yield strength, fatigue poses a significant threat to structures exposed to waves and currents. Anchors, vital for station keeping, are susceptible to fatigue damage, particularly in the padeye area. This paper conducts a fatigue analysis, focusing on factors such as the wall thickness of the ring anchor, inner stiffeners, and stiffener thickness, to evaluate the performance of DERA in this context. The results showed that the stiffener significantly affects the elongation of the total life of the anchor. In conclusion, this paper focuses on advancing innovations like DERA, enabling the efficient utilization of offshore wind resources, and addressing safety concerns through meticulous fatigue analysis.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Enhanced lightning strike protection using vertically oriented carbon fiber melded with conventional carbon fiber-reinforced composite and its validation through damage analysis

Lightning strike protection (LSP) is one of the prime factors in aerospace and wind industries concerning safety, enhanced service life, and reduced downtime. To ensure better LSP, high electrical conductivity is required to dissipate the current, which is always a challenge for polymer composites due to the inherent insulating nature of the polymer matrix. Conventional carbon fiber-reinforced composites (CFRP) offer electrical conductivity in the planar direction while the vertical i.e. through-thickness conductivity still remains a challenge. Having been motivated by this fact, we have fabricated CFRP interleaved with vertically oriented CF (Z-fiber) for the lightning strike test (100 kA). A paint was applied to mimic the actual service condition of the composite laminates. We have prepared two Z-fiber composites: (a) Z-1 containing one Z-fiber layer on the top along with conventional CF layers and (b) Z-5 containing five interleaved Z-fiber layers and compared the properties with conventional CFRP (Z-0). Interestingly, even a single Z-fiber layer (Z-1) showed lower damage (visual damage diameter 22 mm) than Z-0 (visual damage diameter 26 mm). Z-5 displayed the lowest damage (visual damage diameter 16.7 mm), which was further confirmed by cross-sectional optical microscopy. Improved LSP was attributed to the higher through-thickness electrical conductivity in the case of Z-5 (9 times with respect to Z-0) reflecting a lower electrical anisotropy for Z-fiber composites. The residual mechanical property after the lightning test was analyzed through the flexural test, and the retention of flexural strength and modulus was 66% and 86%, respectively for Z-5 showing a significant improvement in comparison to Z-0 (>40% for both).

Saha, Subhabrata↗

DOE OSTI2022

2021 Component Innovation Awardee: Windurance, LLC

Distributed wind turbine manufacturers seeking to enter the market are often hampered by two challenges: not enough capital and no specific expertise in developing certified electronic equipment. A harsh reality is that off-the-shelf power electronics are neither certified nor cost-effective. This lack of certified controller equipment in the distributed wind energy industry adds expense and impedes market penetration related to certification for individual wind turbines, wind system projects, and installations. Normally, these certification costs would be borne repeatedly by individual turbine manufacturers or developers on a model-by-model or project-by-project basis, resulting in cost and time delays as well as uncertainty and risk for project developers and prospective owners. Windurance seeks to eliminate these challenges by developing and obtaining third-party certification of a standardized wind turbine controller. This will facilitate development, certification, and production while supporting efficiencies not easily achievable by individual manufacturers. Windurance's Distributed Wind Industry Turbine Controller will enable manufacturers to apply proprietary turbine- specific configurations and functionality. When applicable, manufacturers can expand on a Windurance-provided software framework to add unique or proprietary functionality.

CIP↗