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US Offering $45M For Huge Wind Energy Test Bed
coondoggie writes "On a day when one of the largest wind farm plans bit the dust, the US Department of Energy is offering up a five-year, $45 million grant to design and build a large dynamometer facility for testing 5 to 15 MW rated wind turbines and equipment. The DOE says such a facility is needed as the US has fallen behind other countries in the race to build ever-larger wind turbines for energy production. According to the DOE, the average size of wind turbines installed in the United States in 2007 increased to roughly 1.65 MW. Additionally, turbines already developed range in the 2.5 MW to 3.5 MW capacity sizes; with plans being developed for even greater power ratings. The larger wind turbines have outpaced the availability of US-based testing facilities, the DOE stated."
Build it, I say. That'll teach those birds to crap on my car!
This blows!
So if I understand this correctly...
We are looking for an artificial environment to test devices that specifically will be used in the natural unpredictable outdoor environment as their sole purpose?
Why not put them in a large windy area and map out their performance with actual gusty conditions and directional changes like they will be subject to in practice.
You'd get better data by skipping the artificial step.
If you really need the extremes to be on demand for destruction testing then put a big fan in front and a shroud around the device to be stress tested. Ramp it up and see how she performs.
Cost wise you could be selling all the energy that the time tests generate to pay for the spot testing and cleanup of the stress tests that fail.
Why do we need a giant test facility to create what's out there already and is the final place these things will be operating in anyway?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
IANAE (Engineer, yes) however I seem to recall the energy generation from wind turbines being a fairly simple function of the size. Although I understand there is an acreage issue is it truly necessary to develop bigger and bigger turbines? Can someone explain this? Is it simply that we should optimize the land useage?
Also, bring on the inevitable "ditch wind, go nuclear" stuff. I can has mod points now?
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I used to work for an aircraft engine company (Pratt & Whitney). They had lots of test cells for engine testing & research. This was a big heavy block of reinforced concrete with lots of instruments attached, and you bolt the engine to it.
I really doubt a wind turbine generates more power. I'm sure you could build one on the edge of a cliff so you don't need to worry about the wind turbine blades hitting something.
Those 687 wind turbines in Pickens' garage are laying there doing nothing...
Wait for it...
So a gigantic blade doesn't go flying in to someone's house.
When you are talking machines as big and as heavy as this, you want to test outside conditions in a safe environment to make sure it won't fail. You do not want to discover later that oh, maybe it WASN'T as strong as we thought.
Same reason why the bend wings on an airplane. No, they will never face stresses that high in the real world. However, we don't want to just fly it around and say "ok, that's probably good" only to find out later that no, it really isn't. You test an outside case, and you do it somewhere that nobody gets hurt.
It's so government.
I once worked in an R&D facility for heavy hydraulic equipment. They had about fifty test cells of different sizes, the largest of which was used for hydraulic transmissions for medium-sized locomotives. Those test setups used a big motor and a water-cooled brake; the hot water went through a cooling tower, and then to sprinklers in what appeared to be a decorative lake out front but was really a heat sink. That gear was in the 5MW range, somewhat smaller than what's being described here, but not a lot smaller.
That setup was where it belonged, near the engineers who designed the things and the machinists who built the prototypes. When the big test cell was put in, it took a few months to build. Not five years.
Most of the posters seem to be under the false impression that this will be some huge wind tunnel facility. One of the difficult problems in designing a wind turbine is that the shaft turns very slowly, but electrical generators operate much more efficiently at higher shaft velocities. With the sort of dynamometer they are talking about, you use a very large motor to spin the generator (and possibly the attached drivetrain) and measure how its efficiency throughout its speed range.
Umm, That is not ordinary hot air you're referring to
It is more like flatulence
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
why do we need these testing facilities? the answer... turbines on mars , were else are we suposed to get the electricity to make water when ww3 ( the war for gas ) ends and the last surviving humans leave earth now that it's a nuclear wast land and go to live on terraformed mars
from http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/PAIS/WindTunnel.html :
The largest wind tunnel in the world is at NASA's Ames Research Center. This subsonic tunnel, which can test planes with wing spans of up to 100 feet, is over 1,400 feet long and 180 feet high. It has two test sections: one 80 feet high and 120 feet wide, the other 40 feet high and 80 feet wide. Air is driven through these test sections by six 15-bladed fans. Each fan has a diameter equal to the height of a four-story build
windturbines currently being deployed have blades of over 60 meters (200 feet, so a diameter of 400 feet) how are you going to fit them into those tunnels ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
All this talk about solar and wind eneergy being "free" and building these giant wind farms and turbines has had me wondering about something that I never see addressed. Has anyone considered the meteorological effects of removing all that energy from the atmosphere? I mean wind and solar energy serve a FUNCTION, they move our weather systems around, melt our snow, power our rivers, etc. You start taking a significant chunk of that energy out of the atmosphere, couldn't you end up with climate changes that could be even more devestating than the global warming you're trying to avoid?
No energy is truly "free," after all. But environmentalists keep talking about wind and solar as if there's NO downside whatsoever. It seems to me that there might be a pretty big one.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I presently work in the Detroit area on software to control ~100kW motor/generators for cars. I'd like to move up to the megawatt range, where do I go? BTW IPM motors are the way to go IMO.
Seriously, I don't think adequate test facilities are the constraint in wind turbine size. Have you seen one of these larger turbines being built? The limiting factor is not the DOE, it's the DOT. There is simply no way to get something that big to the construction site. There aren't roads, or trucks large enough to handle anything bigger. Once it's there, you have to find a crane big enough to lift it.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Power transmission is a bigger emergency than wind power.
And it would seem Texas and California would agree. Both have approved multi Billion dollar infrastructure upgrades. Which, even if a new wind farm started construction today likely would not be operational prior to the completion of the new lines several years from now.
Disclaimer: I work for the parent company of Lone Star Transmission.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
because nuclear is not politically correct to a liberal. it's all about the earth and sun, don't you know?
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
Energy is extracted from the area that the blades cover. Twice as long blades means four times the area (pi * r ^ 2), which in turn means four times the energy. Of course, it's much more complicated than that, you can't just make double the blade length for twice the cost (must be stronger, etc.) but still.
Here's some info:
http://www.windpower.org/en/tour/wtrb/size.htm
How about this Honeywell Windgate "personal" turbine, under 6 feet across and under 100 pounds, generating power at as little as 2MPH (about 6W), up over 45MPH (over 2.4KW). It's $4500 at Ace Hardware, but the IRS will refund 30% of its price under the Obama Stimulus programme, $1350 for a net $3150 price (and your state might rebate another 20-50%+). In NYC (average wind speed 12.2MPH at LGA producing about 200W), $3150 takes about 7.5 years to break even. Which is about how long all these consumer-grade energy generation or efficiency products take to break even, except CFLs which pay off after about 8 months.
That means the Windgate is the watershed: it marks the price:generation efficiency point past which harnessing wind through your hardware store is affordable. Further improvements will be in reference to today's breakthroughs.
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make install -not war