Browsing by Subject "Wind turbine"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) in Northern Minnesota Using Underground Mine Workings and Above Ground Features
    (University of Minnesota Duluth, 2015) Fosnacht, Donald R; Wilson, Elizabeth J; Marr, Jeffrey D; Carranza-Torres, Carlos; Hauck, Steven A; Teasley, Rebecca
    The goal of this research project is to determine the potential viability, environmental sustainability, and societal benefits of CAES, as a vital, enabling technology for wind turbine based power generation. The intent of this research is to provide a clear roadmap for CAES development in Minnesota. This project is multifaceted and draws resources across the University System and from key industrial partners: Great River Energy and Minnesota Power. The results from the project will provide vital information to decision makers on the potential of CAES and give guidance on how the technology can be implemented using the unique assets of the Minnesota’ various Iron Ranges (Mesabi and Cuyuna) or in other areas, so that renewable mandates and greenhouse gas reduction can be effectively accomplished. The results show that the topography and water resources exist at various sites that could allow a 100 to 200 MW facility to be constructed if the overall economic, mineral rights, and environmental issues associated with a given site can be properly managed. This report delves into the possibilities and outlines selection criteria that can be used for site selection. Other information is developed to compare the potential economic impact of implementation of the project within the constraints of the factors that can be monetized using the current policy environment. Finally, potential life cycle, regulatory, environmental, and permitting issues that are associated with implementation of the concept are discussed.
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    Design and implementation of a control system for the Mesabi V27 wind turbine
    (2013-05) Thorson, William M.
    The focus of this thesis is the design and implementation of a control law for a Vestas V27 turbine. There are two motivations for this work. First, there is a rapidly growing industry to refurbish turbines and the proposed control design can be used to update V27 turbines to extend their operational life. Second, the proposed control design will be open-source thus enabling the V27 turbine to be used for research purposes. The thesis will first provide a review of traditional wind turbine control systems. Next the V27 turbine hardware, software, and design specification are described. A control system is then described that includes supervisory control and a SISO classical control for the rotor speed tracking controller. Experimental test results are presented using a V27 turbine installed at the Mesabi Range Community and Technical College.
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    The effect of dynamic operation and incoming flow on the wake of a utility-scale wind turbine
    (2021-07) Abraham, Aliza
    Wind turbine wakes, the regions of slower and more turbulent air behind turbines, lead to power losses up to 40% and increased structural loading on downwind turbines within a wind farm. To mitigate these detrimental effects, improved understanding of wake behavior is required. However, modeling wind turbine flows in the laboratory or in simulations is hindered by the wide range of relevant scales and the complexity of atmospheric flow and turbine operation. Because of these limitations, field scale studies are essential. Conventional field scale flow measurement techniques such as lidar and anemometers have limited spatio-temporal resolution, inhibiting their ability to capture the highly dynamic and heterogeneous behaviors characteristic of wind turbine wakes. To address these shortcomings, super-large-scale flow imaging with natural snowfall is used to analyze the flow in the wake of utility-scale wind turbine. The current work focuses on the impact of constantly-changing atmospheric conditions and dynamic turbine operation on the near wake, the region within four rotor diameters downstream of the turbine. The flow in this region significantly impacts wake development downstream, including meandering, mixing, and recovery. The current research investigates the effect of coherent vortical structures in the inflow, the impact of the turbine nacelle and support tower on the near wake, dynamic wake modulation, and the interaction between the wake and the ground surface. Dynamic wake modulation, the large-scale motion of the wake in response to changes in incoming flow and turbine operation, is shown to substantially enhance mixing between the wake and the surrounding flow. The findings of this research have important implications for wind farm design, layout, and controls. New understanding of wind turbine wake behaviors can be incorporated into simplified models used to optimize wind farms and evaluate their impacts on their surroundings. Improving the accuracy of these models can increase efficiency and reduce power production uncertainty. Additionally, advanced control algorithms to minimize wake losses can be designed based on the presented relationships between turbine operational parameters readily available to the controller and wake behaviors. These direct connections pave the way for more precise wake prediction and control under real operating conditions.
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    Source, Spring-Summer 2007
    (University of Minnesota Extension, 2007) University of Minnesota Extension
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    System identification for the Clipper Liberty C96 wind turbine
    (2014-06) Showers, Daniel
    System identification techniques are powerful tools that help improve modeling capabilities of real world dynamic systems. These techniques are well established and have been successfully used on countless systems in many areas. However, wind turbines provide a unique challenge for system identification because of the difficulty in measuring its primary input: wind. This thesis first motivates the problem by demonstrating the challenges with wind turbine system identification using both simulations and real data. It then suggests techniques toward successfully identifying a dynamic wind turbine model including the notion of an effective wind speed and how it might be measured. Various levels of simulation complexity are explored for insights into calculating an effective wind speed. In addition, measurements taken from the University of Minnesota's Clipper Liberty C96 research wind turbine are used for a preliminary investigation into the effective wind speed calculation and system identification of a real world wind turbine.