General Electric — enhance the efficiency of old wind turbines

    




This work was conducted by engineers of the company to GE in the framework of the project on renewable energy with a total value of 2 million US dollars, according to cheburek.net.

One of the problems for development of wind energy is that existing wind turbines are not sufficiently effective to replace one coal-fired power plant needed to build a wind farm containing thousands of turbines and occupying a rather large area. According to experts, the efficiency of wind turbines depends on the height of the rotor and the size of the blades – the higher the setting and the larger the rotor, the more energy is produced. In accordance with this rule in the past few years, the height of wind turbines has increased from 15.2 meters to 152 meters.

GE engineers proposed to cut a 27-metre blade in half and insert a 7-meter detail, the contours of which correspond exactly to the contours of the original blade. According to the company, such operation over the blades will allow a 20% increase in performance of the wind turbine at lower wind speeds.

The reconstructed blade exceeded the standards of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as in the static tests and in tests for fatigue failure, in which it was conducted through 6 million cycles.

Source: greenevolution.ru