Report on

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

“WIND ENERGY”

Submitted to

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY

PHAGWARA, PUNJAB

From 07/06/21 to 08/07/21

SUBMITTED BY

Name of student: Abhishek Kumar Patel

Registration Number: 12001445

Signature of student:
 Undertaking from the student

I Abhishek Kumar Patel, Registration Number 12001445. Hereby

declare that the information provided by me in the above format
are complete and true to the Best of my knowledge, belief and
information. I hereby undertake to present the recordings of the
Sessions for verification immediately upon demand by the
concerned authorities of the University. In case any of the above
mentioned information is found wrong or incorrect then
disciplinary action can be initiated against me by the university.

Signature of the student:

Date: 08-july-2021
The global challenges of climate change:

You can see the global monthly mean of CO2. Carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere of the earth, and you can see that it's increasing gradually from
390 to 400 parts per million. What you can also see is the red curve, which
shows that the CO2 content of the atmosphere is increasing in the wintertime
and decreasing in the summertime when we have the photosynthesis active.

You can see the increase of global temperature from all the meteorological
stations in the world.
And this is from 1880 to 2015. And you can see that the global mean
temperature is increasing all along those 135 years by 1.4 degrees celsius.
The need for wind energy in the energy system is
to replace fossil fuel-based electricity generation:

• As we have seen, to combat climate change on a global scale, But.

• Also to mitigate environmental concerns which is more on a regional
or a local scale, which is associated with.
• Fossil fuel-fired power plants emission of particles, nitrogen oxides,
or sulfur oxides.
• Wind energy is also increasing the security of energy supply of our
energy system because it is a domestic fuel that we don't need to
import from politically unstable regions of the globe.
• It is cost competitive It would be traditional power generation and it
provides local employment and regional economic development.
• It can be installed very fast compared to conventional power plants.

From Centralised to De-Centralised Power

System:

So we have transformed our energy system from a centralized power system

to a decentralized power system. In the 1980's we had 15 centralized power
plants spread over the country. That's the red dots. And today we have also
15 power plants. They have now been converted to combine heat and power
plants so they are both producing electricity and heat. On top of that we have
installed 415 decentralized combined heater power plants and that is the
green dots you can see on the right hand figure.

The blue ones are the wind turbines that are also spread all over the country.
So we have transformed the electricity system of Denmark from a
centralized to a very decentralized system which it is today.

Roughness Length (Parameter):

So one of the parameters in the logarithmic wind profile is the surface

roughness Z_0, and here we have an example of four classes of surface
roughness, this represents sea conditions where surface roughness is very,
very low.

1. In this case we have set it to 0.0002 meters and this is a fairly

characteristic value for sea. It's also characteristic that the roughness
of the seas are not a constant but it varies with the wind speed.

2. If you look at a landscape like this, you can see that it's an open
landscape with grassland. But you can also see that it's quite free
 so the wind can easily blow over the landscape. We consider this to
have a roughness of about three centimeters.

3. In this case, down here, we have farm land. We have more vegetation
and vegetation is very good to drag momentum out of the wind and
reduce the wind. So we assign this to a roughness of about zero point
one meter.

4. And in this case here, you have many shelter belts or you can have a
forest, small forest. And we think that this has a roughness of about 40
centimeters.

However, it's characteristic but it's very difficult to estimate the

roughness. You need very, very careful measurement and Therefore it's
often better to use predetermined values. And here we have an example of
the roughness links put out as a table. And as can be seen from the table,
again we have at the bottom, the roughness for the sea, very, very low. And
we also have, for example, mown grass, bare soil of the order of one
centimeter. Shelter belts, again, 40 centimeters.
But we have recently come to the conclusion that the forest can have a quite
high roughness. There's still some discussion about the roughness length of
the forest. In this case, we have set it to 80 centimeters. And it's also
characteristic for the forest that a dense forest has a lower roughness than a
sparse forest, and a sparse forest can be up to 1.5 meters in roughness. So it's
often better, if you don't have really high-quality measurement of the wind
profile, to use Z_0 determined from a table like this.

Diurnal Wind Variability:

So this is an example how the wind changes during the day and during the
night and as function of height. Here we have land conditions and you can
see that in this case 30 meters we have, as we explained before, low winds
speeds during the night. It increases during the day, because you have the
convection that starts, you have the efficient mixing of the energy from
above. And then during the night it decreases again. These are real
measurements. If we go a little higher at about 50 meters, we have the same
variation. But it's the difference between day and night is low. And at about
150 meters in this case, which is a rural case, we can see that there's very
little variation between the wind speed during night and during the day.

And then, it's quite interesting that above that, we have higher wind speeds
during the night than during the day, and the effect is very strong. And we
will come back to this effect in a moment. This is land conditions. Water
conditions, it's different because over water you don't have the heating of the
water and the cooling of the water during the night and the heating during
the day. And therefore you can see that the structure of the wind speed as
function of height does not have the characteristic pattern as it has over land.
Wind Speed and Direction Varies With Height-
day:

So here are some examples of real wind profiles during the day. We have
low wind on a sunny day, and here, we see that the wind speed is low, and
near, constant with height, the wind shear. The directional shear is also low
because of the efficient mixing.

If it's overcast, you're closer to neutral. But you still have a low wind, a low
directional shear. But you have a more pronounced profile.
Wind Speed and Direction Varies With Height -
Night:

this is completely different during the night. First of all, the wind speed
increases much more during the night than during the day. It's near linear.
The directional change is much, much bigger than during the day. And this
is a windy night, Night with a low-level jet. You can see the formation of the
jet, in this case about 300 meters, and a very pronounced directional shear.
The classical problem:

You have a cup anemometer to the right in the picture, you want to measure,
you want to put up a wind turbine. Or you have a wind turbine, but you also
have a very complicated terrain. You can see to the left you have a water,
beach. You have an escarpment and then you want to put up the wind
turbine somewhere. So the question is, how do we do this? You want to use
the measurements. You can see from the mast to the right, you have a very
good, long-term measurement, but how do they represent the wind where the
wind turbine is?

So the worst thing you can do in such a case, is you can make a linear
interpolation.
What are the important key words used in wind
energy?

First and foremost, we need to understand that when we study

turbulence, some understanding of the coordinate system, the base
coordinate system, the transformed coordinate system and vector and matrix
computations is very important.

• Wind vector, as we all call it, is composed of three components. Here,

you can see u, v and w. And simply, this wind vector has a magnitude
and a length, a magnitude and a direction, so the direction is measured
with respect to a certain reference axis which we call as the wind
direction.

• Another important key word, and probably the most frequently used
key word in wind energy, is turbulence intensity. So this is a statistic,
which is used to quantify turbulence, and what information is required
to estimate sample turbulence intensity is the mean wind speed and
the standard deviation. The standard deviation is simply computed
using the fluctuations of the time series.

• The next very important key word is the turbulence scales. Again as
an example of this time series where you see random fluctuations, we
can see that there are fluctuations which are occurring on a very large
time scale and fluctuations, which are happening on a very small time
scale. That is rapid fluctuations.

• Now when we decompose this random time series using a concept

called a Fourier series, then we simply get the mean component out
and then every, then the whole fluctuating time series can be
decomposed into waves with a certain frequency and a wavelength.
For example here, there are shown three waves with a particular
frequency and a wavelength and every wavelength can be thought as a
length scale or the inverse of it.
Data Analysis:
averaging periods is very important. Ten minute period is routinely used in
wind energy, but it is recommended the 30 minute period be used for
turbulence studies. And what are the considerations? It mainly depends on
the Integral Time Scale. One thing to remember is larger the Integral Time
Scale, larger should be the averaging period.
Coming to sampling frequencies, what are the considerations? It also
depends on the integral time scale. So normally, the sampling frequency
should be much smaller than the Integral Time Scale. Otherwise the random
errors in the estimated turbulence statistics is quite large, which normally we
don't like. And now you can see a connection between the concepts that
were introduced previously and the concepts used also in routine data
analysis.

Then, removal of spikes. This is a very typical time series where, you not
only see fluctuations, but huge jumps in the wind velocities on a very shorter
time scale. Which normally can be thought about as spikes and this, we need
to remove, otherwise we artificially increase the amount of energy at higher
frequencies.There's something called as de-trending the time series, as you
can see here, if the mean is not constant here, the fluctuations simply, the
magnitude of the fluctuations or the magnitude of the wind speed increases
with time and there is some kind of a trend here. Which is non-stationarity
while analyzing data. And this is also something that we need to remove. So
in this lcture, we have learned about some statistical concepts used in
understanding turbulence. Some keywords used in wind energy, and some
key concepts related to data analysis.
Individual Components of the Costs:

So let's look at the individual components of the costs that go into making
and operating the wind farm.

Firstly in this development phase, we're going to have to pay out for actually
making assessments of the sites. We also need to do a wind resource
campaign. And we're going to have to get these permissions and licenses,
and we are most probably going to need some expert advice from outside.
It very much depends on the size of your company, whether you can do this
in-house or whether you have to hire in.
We need to do designs and we need to do the legal framework. And the last
here, I've put down here, which is a very important part of any of the
development phase of a wind farm, and that is the environmental study.

Then we move on to the implementation and operation itself. The

implementation is where we actually construct the wind farm and we need to
buy and put in the turbines, we need to make the foundations, substations,
and cabling, and at last, of course, we need to actually make the grid
connection in order to be able to sell our electricity on into the grid.
When that's done we enter the operational phase. And the day-to-day
operation will need some management. You will need to pay some staff
there. The maintenance, as I talked about earlier, whether you do that in-
house as your own company or whether you contract that in, that very much
depends on what sort of a developer or owner that you are. And also you
will need some administrative costs and maybe some land rental fees and
that sort of thing too. Finally, we come to the decommissioning phase. And
this is really where you either decide you're going to repower, in which case
you come to a new project, Or you take everything away and you return the
site to its original purpose.

How much might these phases cost?

Let's just take a look at the development and implementation. For a 50
Megawatt onshore wind farm, we're looking at somewhere around about 65
million Euros. These are, of course, very approximate figures. For the
operation, for a 2 Megawatt machine, which is a very common size
these days, we're looking at about 40,000 Euro per machine, per year.
And finally, for the decommissioning. We might be looking at around about
3 million Euro for the whole wind farm. Finally, then, we should just take a
look at the profile of a wind farm, the economic profile, which is a little bit
different from conventional generating stations. And I've got here a quote
from the Danish Energy Agency which says that: "Wind turbines are
expensive generating installation investments."

Hence the production costs are highly dependent on the installation costs
and their financing. And this brings us to another component of the cost.
And that is the cost of capital. This is what it will cost you to borrow money
to be able to build and operate the wind farm. It's unlikely that most
companies these days have that sort of money what's required in their own
pockets, so you will need to go out and borrow the money. And that's why
we have this cost in here.

Revenue: Production and Price

So let's look at revenue. What is it? It's got two components, production and
price.
The economic revenue of a wind farm is, of course, related to how much
energy it produces. So that means how much energy actually goes through
the meter and into the public grid. And of course, how much their energy is
actually sold for. So we have these two components, the energy in Megawatt
hours, and the price in Euros per Megawatt hours.

Revenue: Production
Let's take a look at each of these in turn, the production side of things, the
key figure here is the annual energy production.
We need the net AEP as measured at the electricity meter. And this means
we can't use anything information-like from the wind turbines themselves,
because we have the losses that go through the cables, and through the
transformers, and the switch gear. Before we actually get to the public grid.
So we need to take it as a net one at the meter. Now for a proposed project,
this AEP is going to have to be estimated, because we don't actually have a
wind farm to give us the real figure. Now, there are many software tools out
there that, with the correct expertise, can give us a very good idea of our
annual energy production. But, I must point out here that what we're looking
at is an average over the whole lifetime of the wind farm because we all
know that wind is a variable resource and so our production will go up and
down from year to year.

And for our economic analysis what we need is an average over that whole
lifetime. Now here we're just going to look at a very simple approximation
for this AEP calculation.
And what we need for this is the capacity of the wind farm, which in our
case now is let's just say is 50 Megawatts. And we're going to use a capacity
factor of 25%, and this means that, on average, the wind farm will be
producing at full capacity for 25% of the time. Of course this is, again, a
very average figure. And if we use these then this will give approximately
110 Gigawatt hours of electricity generated in a year.

How did we get there?

Well, we used the capacity of the wind farm, the 50 Megawatts. We
multiplied by the number of hours in a year and that's 8,760. And we
multiply it again by this capacity factor. And this gives 110,000 Megawatt
hours or 110 Gigawatt hours. Looking at the other half of the revenue and
that's the price.

Revenue: Price

Now electrical energy from wind turbines is a commodity, just like any other
commodity, it can be bought and sold. And the price of this commodity can
vary from right down from how much it actually costs to produce up to
anything that somebody is prepared to pay for it on the open market. And as
a wind farm operator, we can of course sell into this sort of electricity
market, but the challenge is, is that we are always receiving a varying price
for our wind energy. And in many countries, supporting the investment in
renewable energy is a very important thing to do because it reduces the CO2
output of a country. And also goes towards making it less dependent on
fossil fuels. So politically, that is a good idea to try to support the
investment. And how do we do that? Most commonly, we use different types
of tariff on the electricity price.
This first one is the feed-in tariff. It's very simple, it's been used a lot and
what it means is that we get a guaranteed support for each Kilowatt hour or
Megawatt hour of electricity that we put into the grid. This gives investors a
good certainty of the future revenue from a wind farm and means that they
can make economic calculations with a good degree of certainty.

The slight problem with it is, that actually setting this level of support is a
little bit tricky. And almost always, from a national prospective, we will get
more than we wanted or less than we wanted, depending on exactly where
we place this. Another mechanism is the price premium tariff. And here we
can see that we sell into the market and we get a varying price per Kilowatt
hour for our electricity. But to help us along, we get a guaranteed fixed
support on top of that. And what that means is that as an operator, we are a
little bit exposed to the variations of the market, but we have this buffer here
to help us. And this also gives a bit more certainty to the investor. What it
also means as an operator, it means we can concentrate more on trying to
focus on when the electricity price is highest, and get the best revenue.
Two more simple mechanisms. This one here is called tendering. And what
this means is that an individual developer will bid for a specific project. And
they will bid saying that we need a certain number of Euros per Megawatt
hour for this project, in order to be able to make it feasible for our business
case. Then an authority will take a look at the various bids they've received
and make a choice, depending on certain criteria. It could well be that it was
just on price. And then they will award the contract to a developer to build
the wind farm. And that developer, when the wind farm is operating, will get
this guaranteed support level.So, it's a little bit like the feed in tariff, but it
has this very large element of competition right at the start. Finally, here we
have the green certificate scheme. This is a little bit more complex.We sell
the electricity into the market as usual. But for each Megawatt hour of
electricity that we produced, we get green certificates.On the other hand,
users of electricity are obliged to buy a certain percentage of their electricity
from renewable sources. If they don't, then they can buy these green
certificates as some kind of makeup. And in this way we have a market of
buying and selling these green certificates. It is, in fact, quite a complex
scheme to administer and for that reason, this is not proven to be quite so
popular.

Principal Concepts for Wind Energy Extraction:

Let's have a look at the different concepts. The most well known is the
horizontal axis wind turbine, where the energy from the wind is extracted
from a rotating shaft, that is parallel to the wind. It's rotating due to the lift
forces on the air foils of it's blades. Another concept, the blades are rotating
in a horizontal plane, and also driven by lift, where the shaft is now vertical.
Therefore, it's called vertical axis wind turbine Another typical vertical axis
turbine is the drag base Savonius turbines where the drag on one side is
larger than the drag on the other side. And therefore, creates a moment that
makes the shaft rotate.
The flying lift based machines, one of them is the kite that pulls a cable that
then pulls the generator that is mounted on the ground. And the last one, the
machines that are using flow induced vibrations is the last category. We'll
have a closer look at each of these categories and
give some examples in the next couple of slides.

First, we will have a look at the efficiencies of the different concepts. The
mechanical power is, from any concept, can be calculated from the air
density, the swept area from which the energy is extracted off the wind, the
wind speed itself cubed and the power coefficient.

The well known Betz limit is limiting the power coefficient due to
conservation of momentum to about 59%. It's simply due to the fact that the
wind turbine extracts the energy from, the momentum from the wind, which
slows down the wind speed. And there is a limit on how much you can slow
down the wind and still keep an efficient extraction of energy in the swept
area.

You can of course discuss, if you look at the different concepts, what is this
swept area. For example, if you look at a vertical axis turbine you could say
that it has two areas of which it extracts. One in the front and one when the
blade is passing behind the other blades. Of course, the energy in the latter
will not be as much and in the front because it's in the shadow of the first
one. So unless there is energy coming from outside into the second plane, it
will still have a power coefficient that is limited to the Betz limit.
The swept area is also given by the geometry of the rotor. Here I am
showing the power coefficient for the different rotating concepts that have
been derived over the years, both experimentally and numerically. These are
some of the results that are coming out. On the y-axis, we have the power
coefficient, and on the x-axis, we have the tip speed ratio. The tip speed ratio
is the ratio between the tangential speed of the rotor tip, due to the rotation
divided by the wind speed. You see here that in this case, goes from zero to
about seven. We have the modern commercial turbine which is running with
a quite high tip speed ratio and it can produce quite high power coefficients
between 40% and 50%. We also have the vertical axis turbine, the Darrieus
type turbine which also running with quite high tip speed ratio and also
produces relatively high power coefficients.

In this low range of the tip speed ratio, we find the multi-plated rotors that
can produce a high torque but not one very fast. It has a power coefficient up
to 30 %, and is therefore also more efficient than the drag base machines,
which also have low tip speed ratios. Like these Savonius turbines between
10% and 15% efficiency. The flying lift-based machines are a little bit more
difficult to define a power coefficient based on the swept area, because the
swept area depends on how you are flying the kite. The principle of
operation is that you're flying the kite out, it pulls the cable, and when it's
fully extended you pull back the kite and then you fly it out again.
lift on the kite.
The main component of the turbine is the rotor that generates the
aerodynamic torque from the wind. It's the nacelle that converts the torque
into electrical power up here. It's the tower that holds the nacelle and the
rotor blades up in the wind, and also provides access to the nacelle for
maintenance. And it's the foundation that holds the whole turbine in place
and into the wind. The main degrees of freedom of wind turbine is the
azimuth, the rotation off the rotor we call the azimuth. And normally it's
calculated from vertical distance, the azimuth angle. We have the yaw,
which is the degree of freedom that is used to turn the nacelle into the wind
and the whole rotor. Then we have the pitch angle, which is rotations of the
blades about it's lengthwise axis, typical due to a controller action.

If we look at the rotor it consists of the blades, the hub, the spinner, and the
pitch bearing, and also the pitch system, which is inside the hub. You can
see the hub behind the spinner in here, the metal part, and outside typical
glass fiber plastic hub. And then we have the blades here on the ground.
In this case, for these blades the pitch bearing, the bearing which turns the
blades about their lengthwise axis is part of the blade and not of the hub.
Typically, it would be part of the hub. And here we see how the whole rotor
is lifted up to the turbine we have here at the DTU campus, Risoe.
If we look at the nacelle it consists of the drivetrain that converts the air
dynamic torque that goes in through the hub, through the main shaft, or also
called the low speed shaft. It is hold by the main bearing and a gearbox
where there's also a bearing, and it translate the speed of the low speed shaft
into a high speed shaft that goes into the generator. On the high speed shaft
we have also the mechanical break for breaking the turbine at stand still.
And all this is mounted on the bed plate which forms the entire nacelle. And
this bed plate can then also turn in the all direction on the tower top
using a yaw drives. The generator is connected to the converter, typically we
have a variable speed turbine, which a converter can convert the speed of the
generator into the grid frequency. And this is then through some
transformation into the grid.

The tower, the typical tower you see is a tubular tower made of steel. But it
could also be a lattice tower or even a combination, like a tripod tower,
where you have larger structures than you have in lattice tower
Now, let's look at the stress strain curve where we have a straight line here
in the beginning. So there's a linear relationship between the stress and the
strain. And this is known as Hookes law. Where E here, this is the modulus
of elasticity also known as Young modulus. And this corresponds to the
stiffness of the material. So the stiffness is basically the slope of this line
here. The stiffness is related to how strong the atomic bonds are. And this is
also related to the melting point. So all iron based alloys they will have
roughly the same stiffness. While all aluminum based alloys they will have
roughly the same stiffness. If you want to change the stiffness you need a
major change in chemical composition. Metals that consist of metallic
atoms, that are fixed in a crystal lattice, if we apply a low stress to this
lattice, then we will stretch it and if we relax the stress then we will, the
lattice will revert to it's original shape. And we call this elastic deformation,
which is non-permanent If we increase the stress, then we will reach a
certain point called the yield stress. And here, we will actually break the
atomic bonds. So this is called plastic deformation. And this is permanent.
So if we relax our lattice here, then we will not go back to the original
shape. We will have a new lattice shape. So we have permanently deformed
our material.
So looking at the stress-strain curve, again, we start it out with the stiffness,
the slope with the curve here, then we get the yield stress point where we go
plastic deformation, and on top of the curve, we have the tensile strength.
And this is basically the ultimative strength of the material. And we can see
here that the slope goes down again. And this is because for most metals,
we can get some local deformation the metallic rod here. And since our
engineering stress, it was based on the original cross sectional area, then the
stress will drop. So finally here, we get a fracture, and here we can see what
the ductility of our material is. So the three points here, the yield stress, the
tensile strength and the ductility, they are dependent on the chemical
composition of the metal and the thermal and mechanical treatment of the
metal.
When metallic components that are exposed to cyclic stress, they may fail
from what is called fatigue. And these stresses they can be quite low, and the
important factors for fatigue here, these are, the number of cycles, and the
stress amplitude. And the stress amplitude is the difference between
maximum and minimum stress. These curves here, they can be quite
erratic. They don't need to be a perfect curve.

So here we have S/N curves. These indicate when a material will fail as a
function of the stress amplitude and the number of cycles. So for example, if
we have a lower stress amplitude, it will take a larger number of cycles until
the component fails. So here we have S/N curves. These indicate when a
material will fail as a function of the stress amplitude and the number of
cycles. So for example, if we have a lower stress amplitude, it will take a
larger number of cycles until the component fails. So this is in contrast with,
for example, aluminum. Here, if aluminum is exposed to cyclic stresses, then
it will fail from fatigue sooner or later.
So when a component is exposed to cyclic stresses, then we will initiate a
crack, or may initiate a crack. And this will typically happen at an
unfortunate geometry or at a defect such as inclusions or a scratch in the
surface. Wind turbine components the have many unfortunate geometries.
And here are two examples where we have a gear, where we have an
unfortunate geometry between the gear teeth. And here's also a bolt where
the inside of the thread is quite unfortunate.

When we have initiated, a crack, then it will start to grow. And it will grow
with each cycle when the stress is at its maximum. So each time the crack it
grows, it will leave a mark, like a ring here. And this will be visible in a
microscope and it may also be visible with the naked eye.
Eventually the component will fail, we will have a final fracture surface.
This may be quite large or it can also be small. So the fatigue crack can
sometimes grow almost all the way through the component before it fails.So
this final fracture surface is usually quite rough compared to the surface of
the fatigue crack, which is quite smooth.
So here, we have an example of, this is a gear from a wind turbine gearbox.
You can see it's quite large, this is the cross section of it.
And if you look at the fracture surface here, we can see that there are some
ring marks here and these are from fatigue, Where the crack has grown.
And we can also see here where the crack is initiated we just follow the
marks. We can see that it's in-between two gear teeths. And the final fracture
area is also quite small.

In this case, here, we can see that it is at angle with the fatigue crack. So in
this example here we have a bolt, so this is from a wind turbine foundation,
and again, here, we can see clear marks that indicate a fatigue mode failure.
So in this case we can see that we have several cracks that have initiated
down here at the bottom, and then they've grown into one large crack where
we have the normal fatigue mode as the crack grows upwards.

And the final fracture area is also here, quite small. In this case here, we can
also see that we have a lot of corrosion down here. This also indicates where
the crack has started, since the crack initiation point is the most exposed area
to the elements.
Here are shown a number of existing wind turbine blades plotted as a
function of lenght versus the weight of the blades. If you look at the smallest
blade, then you can see that growth weight regarding weight versus length,
is following nearly a power of three, a power of three will be the case for
pure upscaling of the blade.

If you look at a longer blade, then we have actually growth rate which is a
little lower. If you zoom in on the longest blades then we have two cases
here. Which is made of pure glass, epoxy, or polyester. So this is 70 plus
long blade. This is 80 plus long blade.

This blade is actually also consists of some part of carbon fiber in the load
carrying laminates. The final point up here, which is a 86-meter-long blade,
is a virtual blade, so that's not being produced, but is a reference blade which
will be used in an example later in this lecture. The reference to the work
describing this blade, can be seen here.
First, we will look at the aerodynamic load working on a wind turbine
blade, meaning the flap-wise loading of the blade. You will learn earlier in
the course that the maximum load on a wind turbine blade is reached when
the wind speed is equal to the rated wind speed for the wind turbine blade.

This speed corresponds to the point where the max production is reached for
the turbine, meaning that we are reaching the power of the generator in a
turbine. The corresponding loading on this point is given by this small
equation here. Only consisting of the density of the air, shown here as 1.2
kilograms per cubic meter, the rated wind speed and the length of the blade.

This load will be distributed onto the three wind turbine blades. And actually
distribution will be while a linear function coming from zero load at the root
up to a certain load intensity at the blade tip. This is shown in the equation
describing this variation as a function of x.
Composites consist of two material phases, a brittle and a ductile material.
The brittle is stiff, strong but also a brittle behavior, what we can see in
example on the tensile curve here. Here you can see that the stresses is
actually rather unpredictable and actually given by the biggest flaw in the
material. On the other hand the soft phase which is a matrix material is weak
and ductile as illustrated on the green curve. Mixing these two materials
together then we get a, stiffness, and strength, which are in between the two
phases. But the strengths is now predictable, and we can use this, in a
design, of a structure. We would never imagine designing something of pure
glass. If you look into a cross section of a wind turbine blade, then this is an
illustration of this. We can see that the load carrying part is shown as green
materials here, at three or four spots.

The requirement for the material is high stiffness in order to avoid bending
of the blade and high fatigue resistance of the material. If you take a close
look into the material, inside the blade, then we can see that the uniaxial
composits is built up of fiber bundes consisting of thousand to ten thousand
fibers. The fibers have normally a diameter between 10 to 20 microns if
we look at glass fiber or between 5 and 10 microns if we look at carbon
fiber.
Structural Design of Wind Turbines Blades:

When we do a structural design it's important to know what other loads that
are applied to this structure. We should also understand how is the structure
interacting with the surroundings, how it is connected to the surroundings?
We called that the boundary conditions. Then all structures have a purpose
and this purpose gives the structural requirements to the structure. So by
knowing the loads, the boundary condition and the structural requirements,
we can design the structures, and we should keep in mind that it must not
fail.

What are the boundary conditions?

Well it's where the tires are connected to the road. Then let's look at wind
turbine blades. So when wind turbines placed, we have basically two types
of loads. We have loads from the wind working on the blades in the flap-
wise direction. And we have loads from gravity working on the blades in the
edge wise direction. And the boundaries is where the blade is connected to
the hub.
Now how is typical blade designed? Well it's a compromise between the
aerodynamic and the structural requirements. So from an aerodynamic point
of view we want thin air foils. But from a structural point of view, we want
thick air foils that can carry the loads. So the flap-wise loads coming from
the wind is often taken by a load-carrying gurtel inside the blade while the
edge-wise loading, coming from gravity, is carried by strengthening the
leading edge, and the trailing edge of the blade.

Now in order to design them, we must understand the behavior of the blade
at full scale, the whole blade. But then, when we zoom in, we should also be
able to understand and design the different components of the blades.
And as we zoom in further, we get to the composite materials, the layers, the
laminate. And further on, we come to the material, the fibers, individual
fibers, the matrix around the fibers, and the interface between the fiber and
matrix. And in order to design, we should understand and know the failuar
mechanisms at all these length scales.
Often, but not always, beam deformations are much smaller compared to the
beam length, width, and height. In this case we can use the number of
simplifications and establish the following relations for the beam
deformations. Beam bending rotation theta is actually the first derivative of
the first displacement, while the bean curvature kappa is the second
displacement.

So we can see that the bending moment, M, is actually related to the

beam deformation through the second derivative of the beam deformation.
And we can calculate beam deflection as a function of a position capital X,
by doing the double integration of the beam curvature.
Taking into account boundary conditions.

Wind Turbines Types:

The first type of wind turbines Is called Type 1 and it is based on an
asynchronous generator which connects the wind turbine to the grid. The
advantage of this concept is that it is very simple and with a rotor speed
which is determined by very robust. The asynchronous generator rotates the
frequency in grid and it does not need to be controlled. This concept also
includes a gear box because the rotational speed of the asynchronous
generator is much faster than what we want to have in the rotor of the wind
turbine. And we also are using a capacitor bank, and the reason for this is
that the asynchronous generator is consuming reactive power.

And if we are not compensating for this consumption of reactive power, then
we may experience problems keeping the voltage at the terminals of the
wind turbine. Finally, we have in most modern wind turbines, there is a built
in transformer. This is transforming the voltage from the low voltage level
to a medium voltage level in the grid where we connect the wind turbines.
Type 2, is a simple extension of the Type 1 wind turbine, but this makes it
possible to control the rotor speed of the Type 2 wind turbine. The idea is to
use a variable rotor resistance, which is seen here, and by changing the
resistance in the rotor, we can change the rotational speed of the wind
turbine. This offers the opportunity to vary the speed typically with 10%,
but there is also some heat loss in the variable rotor resistance which is not
advantageous.

The next concept Type 3 is utilizing the energy and is also much more
controllable than the Type 2. This is connecting instead of variable
resistance to the rotor we are connecting the rotor through back-to-back
converter, and by this connection we can be able to utilize the energy which
we were burning. In this resistor, and we can also control the speed in a
much wither range, the rotor speed of the generator. And on top of that, we
can also use this converter to control active and reactive power flow out of
the wind turbine, and that is why we don't see the capacitor bank here
anymore, because we don't need it. Because we can control the reactive
power coming out of this state by controlling this back-to-back converter.

Finally, we have the Type 4, where we have a full converter here, which is
transmitting all the power. Stepping back to the Type 3, It's only about 30%,
maxed 30% of the power that is passing through the converters. So the
advantage is that the converter is much smaller here. Whereas, the main
power is flowing this way through this data. But in the Type 4 case, all the
power is going through the converter meaning that the converter must be
larger.

On the other hand, we have good isolation from the grid which is, can be an
advantage in the case that we have disturbances from the grid side. The cost
of this is added cost for our power electronics.
Now we will talk about connection of wind turbines to the different voltage
levels in the grid and the idea is that we want to, of course, connect to the
wind turbine as close as possible to where we are building the wind
turbine. And generally speaking, we can say that the low voltage levels, they
are available in the vicinity. Like 0.4 kV whereas there can be a longer
distances to the transmission. So we are only connecting at higher voltage
levels if we need to, depending on the size of the wind turbine.
Small wind turbines, they are typically connected to the low voltage gate,
here.
If we have larger groups of wind turbines we often connect them this way.
We can connect them directly to the 10 kilowatt grid but we can also choose
to build a dedicated radial cable where we are transmitting the power into
the transformer station. So that we are disturbing less the consumers
connected to the 10 kV grid here. And finally, having lots offshore, typically
offshore, but it can definitely also be onshore wind farms, we will connect to
the transmission grid at a voltage levels above 100 kilowatts .

In some cases, when we go offshore, we are moving further and further

away from land when we are connecting wind power plants or wind farms.
And If we exceed say 100 or 200 kilometers distance then we have an issue
with stable transmission of the power from the wind plant to the onshore
grid. This cannot be done with conventional alternating current technology
without compensations on the way to land.
And If we exceed say 100 or 200 kilometers distance then we have an issue
with stable transmission of the power from the wind plant to the onshore
grid. This cannot be done with conventional alternating current technology
without compensations on the way to land. And this is because there is a
large consumption of lost generation of reactor power in the cables.

So we need to compensate for this generation. The alternative, which is used

today already, is to transmit the power with direct current from the wind
plant to the onshore. And to do that, we need the wind plant is still working
with alternating currents. And then this alternating current is converted to
direct current and transmitted to shore, and then it is converted back again to
alternating current. Often, when we are connecting wind plants this way,
the DC converter or the AC/DC connection system that we have here is
serving not only one wind plant, but several wind plants, which often can
have different owners also.
actuators, and the whole pitching system can be much cheaper. So this has
been applied in fixed-speed wind turbines. Now, to the point of tracking the
maximum possible power. The power generation, and to understand this,
we can use the power equation that we have here, where the power, we can
see, from a wind turbine is giving us the air density multiplied by the swept
area of the wind turbine and the cube of the wind speed, this is actually the
kinetic energy we have in the wind. Then, we are multiplying this with a
power coefficient which is then actually an aerodynamic efficiency. And we
can see that the power coefficient, it depends on the pitch angle. It also
depends on the tip speed ratio and the tip speed ratio, it's the ratio between
the speed of the tip of the blades to wind speed. Now, the point is that we
can see easily from the power equation that, we want to have as high C_p as
possible. And in order to do that, we should stay on the top of this curve,
which means that we can keep the pitch angle constant. But we need to
change the rotor speed so that it follows the changes that we have in the
wind speed.

So increasing the wind speeds means that we should also increase the rotor
speed. So that is the target of doing maximum power point tracking to
follow the changes in the wind speed.
Now, to the architecture of a wind power plant. What we have here is that
we have a central controller in the wind power plant which is
communicating reference values and receiving back status from the wind
turbines. And also, taking measurements from the point of connection to see
that we are supply what we are supposed to supply to the grid herein the
point of connection. And the access from the operator to the wind power
plant is going directly to the wind power plant controller which is then
automatically taken care of the communicating further down to the
individual wind turbines.
Conclusion:
From the report we studied that wind has a lot of potential in it and if
properly harnessed then it can help solve the energy crises in the world. The
study of wind turbine and its characteristics showed that how it can be
properly designed and used to get the maximum output. The power
electronic circuitries have helped the concept of wind power a lot. Without
them this concept would have been too expensive and far fetched. With the
thyristors and converters being used not only the operations have been
smoothened but also the efficiency has been increased to a great extent.
From the voltage stability analysis it was showed that how a doubly fed
induction generator has superior characteristics than a simple induction
generator. This report also showed the integration of wind farms with the
transmission grid and the problems associated with it and the probable
solutions that can be applied to solve them and have a better performance.

Learning objectives
When you have completed this course, you will be able to:
• Apply basic engineering models for wind speed and determine the
annual energy production for a wind turbine
• Analyse measured wind data and determine the mean wind speed
and turbulence
• Perform simple calculations for assessing wind farm projects and
for calculating the cost of energy from wind
• Account for the configuration and energy production of different
wind turbine designs
• Carry out calculations of thrust and power for a wind turbine
• Calculate the mass of a turbine blade based on different material’s
properties
• Define boundary conditions and loads on beams and calculate
reactions and internal forces

• Apply a strategy for controlling the rotor speed of a variable speed

wind turbine.