Lifetime Extension and Wind Resources – Research Updates at Vind 2024
On October 22, the Swedish Wind Centre, SWC, will lead a research seminar during Vind 2024. Researchers affiliated with SWC will present research on both lifetime extension and wind resources in Swedish conditions. See the programme items below.
The seminar will be held in English and take place from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM at the Waterfront Congress Centre in Stockholm.
Participate for free by registering here no later than 14 October.
More information about Vind 2024 can be found here.
An overview programme for the seminar can be found here.
Programme
13.00: Lifetime extension of wind turbines
Introduction: Turbine owner perspective and concerns related to existing turbines near official end of life. Need and hope related to lifetime extension research
Marie Magnusson, Rabbalshede Kraft
On service life management and decision support for service life extension
Sebastian Thöns, Lund University, Sweden and BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Berlin, Germany.
This presentation provides an overview about recent findings for service life quantification and extension of infrastructures and how this can be related to wind turbine support structures. It begins by outlining methods for identifying service life-limiting scenarios and quantifying service life. Various options for a service life extension can be analyzed by adapting the service life with monitoring, inspection, retrofitting and repair strategies. By utilization of decision analysis methods, potentials are demonstrated of how efficient extension strategies can be identified for optimizing safety, cost of energy and sustainability.
Power curtailment impact on loads, fatigue and life time. Experiences from wind turbine design and existing research findings
Anders Wickström and Saptarshi Sarkar, RISE
Relationships between power, loads, fatigue and lifetime are presented and described including control details to watch out for. The total damage budget of a turbine can be spent in different ways. Either to maximize production over a limited period of time or to maximizes a turbine's lifetime. These options are further described including basic understanding of adaptive control strategies that can be used to reduce damage during worse loading scenarios.
Reporting from IEA-wind task 42: Current international work on lifetime extensions
Håkan Johansson, Chalmers University of Technology
Since 2019, IEA wind is running Task 42 "Wind Turbine Lifetime Extension", to coordinate activities towards the assessment of the remaining operational life of wind turbines near the end of their certified design life and identification of strategies for extending the end of useful life. This presentation will summarize lessons learned from Sweden's participation in the task and provide an outlook on how turbine lifetime extension is discussed in different European countries. Especially noteworthy is how the countries composition of the turbine fleet affects the thinking around lifetime extension (from small singular onshore turbines to big offshore wind farms).
New project: Wind turbine lifetime extension: Review and analysis
All
Reflections and questions from the audience
14.40: Pause
15.10: Wind resources in Swedish conditions
Introduction: Stefan Ivanell, Uppsala University
Replacing met towers with remote sensing - what does the science say?
Johan Arnqvist, Uppsala University
As turbines are becoming increasingly taller the cost of met towers with appropriate heights is getting problematic. There is both great optimism and pessimism around the possibility of replacing met towers with remote sensing such as lidar or sodar. Here we take a look at what recent research can offer in terms of clarifying the potential of remote sensing as met tower replacements.
The potential for truly site specific wind resource assessment over forests
Hugo Olivares Espinosa, Uppsala University
Some of the biggest challenges for the development of wind projects in forested conditions are related to the difficulties in evaluating the effects of turbulence arising from these landscapes. Precisely, the heterogeneities in the forest distribution, the complexity of the terrain and the variations of atmospheric stability along the day give place to a wind field that might look abruptly different over short distances. We present results of an LES-based modelling tool that aims at representing the integrated effects of these elements to assess the wind resource over forested sites.
Constraining the role of large-scale circulation for scenarios of changes in wind power density
Jesper Sjolte, Lund University
We aim to investigate biases of variability for climate modes and wind patterns in climate model simulations, and provide improved projections of future wind patterns for the North Atlantic region. We do this by evaluating the model output against instrumental-based data (back to 1850) and high-quality climate reconstructions covering the past 800-years. Our focus on long-term changes enables us to shed light on the mechanisms behind trends in climate modes and wind.
Active Yaw Control Optimization for Wind Farms: Integrating Neural Networks with Game Theory
Hamidreza Abedi, RISE
This study explores a hybrid method to improve power generation in wind farms using a strategy called Active Yaw Control (AYC). Unlike traditional methods, which rely on preset instructions, the proposed strategy uses an Artificial Neural Network to continually tweak turbine orientations in real-time based on changing weather conditions. The study simulated this strategy using a wind farm with six large turbines and tested it under different wind directions and turbulence levels. The results showed that the AYC strategy could increase the total power output by up to 2.6%, although the effect varied for each turbine. In addition, some parts of the turbines experienced more stress, while others had less. This method shows potential not just for increasing power but also for making wind farms more adaptable to the variable and unpredictable nature of weather. The next steps for researchers involve a thorough examination of how these adjustments affect both the energy produced over a year and the durability of the turbines under different weather scenarios.
Numerical Simulation of a GW-Scale Offshore Wind Farm performed in the EU FLOW project
Warit Chanprasert, Uppsala university
The rotor of utility scale wind turbines, particularly for an offshore site, are designed with greater blade lengths to capture more energy while reducing the levelised-cost of energy. The heights of next-generation turbine tips can be almost 300 m which may exceed the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL), especially during stably stratified conditions. This causes a blade to encounter a turbulent-free atmosphere and atmospheric turbulence in each revolution which can enhance the fatigue loading. For a wind farm scale, previous studies have demonstrated that the ABL height affects the wind farm blockage which reduces wind farm efficiency. In this study, we performed Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of a large offshore wind farm consisting of 100 wind turbines in the ABL heights of 150 m and 500 m. The wind turbines have a rotor diameter of 240 m and ahub height of 150 m with 15 MW rated capacity. The total wind farm efficiencies are 46.0% and 66.4% for the ABL heights of 150 m and 500 m, respectively. The average power output of the second-row turbines is dropped significantly in the shallow ABL compared to the deeper ABL which demonstrated a more pronounced blockage effect.
Reflections and questions from the audience