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Taking inspiration from such a useful feature could also make wind turbines more hurricane-resilient, according to researchers from the University of Colorado (UC) at Boulder. The team, working with colleagues at the University of Virginia, the University of Texas at Dallas, the Colorado School of Mines and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, took inspiration from palm trees during the six-year development of a tough new turbine design.
“We are very much bio-inspired by palm trees, which can survive these hurricane conditions,” said electrical, computer and energy engineer Lucy Pao from UC Boulder.
Traditional upwind turbines face the incoming wind. To avoid being blown into the tower, their blades must be sufficiently stiff – requiring a lot of material and driving up the cost.
Turbine blades on downwind rotors face away from the wind instead, so there is less risk of them hitting the tower when the winds pick up. This means they can be lighter and more flexible, requiring less money and less material. Downwind blades can also bend instead of break in the face of strong winds, much like palm trees.
The researchers developed a two-blade downwind rotor to test the performance of the concept in action. Known as the Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR) turbine, the 53.4kW demonstrator reportedly performed consistently and efficiently during periods of peak wind gusts in four years of real-world testing.
“The blades are manufactured to be lightweight and very flexible, so they can align with the wind loads. That way, we can reduce the cost of the blades and bring down the cost of energy,” said Mandar Phadnis, lead author of a study on the demonstrator.
The design could be most useful for “extreme scale” offshore turbines, Pao said. The team has designed and modelled large-scale 25MW and 50MW SUMR turbines for offshore use, far larger than the roughly 8MW turbines often in use today.
The research was published in the Proceedings of the 2022 American Control Conference.
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