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- Category: Articles
Aiming Towards Environmental and Economic Improvements Through Chemical Recycling
Wind turbine blade waste is becoming an increasing problem as the first generation of turbines is now being decommissioned and the blades are ending up mainly in landfill, incineration and the cement industry. The annual volume of this waste in Europe alone is expected to increase from 40,000 tons to 120,000 tons in the next 10 years.
The wind, composite and chemical industries consider it important to improve the circularity of blades, and new innovations in chemical recycling could play a part in that. The goal of Interreg North Sea Region funded project, DecomTools, is to decrease the costs and environmental impact of the decommissioning of offshore wind farms. The chemical recycling of blades is expected to play an important role in meeting those goals. Therefore, Dutch recycling company Virol will be testing it at a pilot scale as part of the project.
By Nina Vielen-Kallio, New Business Manager, Virol, the Netherlands
- Category: Articles
Developing Radar Absorbing Materials for Mitigating Wind Farm Radar InterferenceWhile the need for renewable energy grows ever stronger and the energy market exploits wind power, the locations available for building wind farms without impacting airports and military bases due to radar interference are rapidly dwindling. Wind turbines can appear as clutter on radar screens, obscuring incoming aircraft, spawning false plots and even interfering with storm and precipitation predictions, making for unsafe landing conditions.
By Adam Nevin, Innovation Lead, Trelleborg Applied Technologies, UK
- Category: Articles
Fibre-Optic Load Sensing to Monitor Rotating EquipmentSensing360 recently released ‘the smart photonic sleeve’ to monitor the load applied on rotating equipment, like bearings and gears. Besides the standardised smart sleeve that serves a broad range of load sensing applications, the company’s fibre-optic sensing technology can also be used for customer specific solutions. Here we show a customer case where Sensing360 has provided a solution to monitor and verify strain levels in the stationary outer ring of a multimegawatt planetary gearbox. Algorithms have been developed that translate these strain signals into crucial engineering and operating parameters such as planet load sharing and torque.
By Georgo Angelis, Sensing360 and Unai Gutierrez Santiago, Siemens Gamesa
- Category: Articles
New High-Resolution Simulations Show Goal is AchievableThe USA currently produces about 7% of its electricity from wind energy [1]. Here we summarise and elaborate on recent research that found that, even without expansion of land area used by wind turbines, the goal of 20% of US national electricity supply from wind energy by 2030 is readily achievable [1]. Quadrupling the installed capacity over the eastern two-thirds of the USA from 2014 levels using ‘repowering’ scenarios achieves the 20% of electricity from wind goal without substantial negative impacts on system-wide efficiency of power production or local climates [1].
By Sara C. Pryor and Rebecca J. Barthelmie, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
- Category: Articles
A Net Zero Solution for Decarbonising Industry, Transport and Heat
The awareness that renewable hydrogen can help to drastically reduce and even eliminate harmful emissions in many industries is growing at a fast pace, with many governments now setting targets to help combat climate change and air pollution.By Dr Graham Cooley, CEO, ITM Power, UK
- Category: Articles
A Way to Optimise Maintenance CostsA growing number of wind turbines are operating in the second or third decade of their lifetime. As an owner of 20-year-old Micon turbines in Germany I would like to describe the possibilities and solutions for operating these wind turbines cost-effectively with the current low market prices for electricity supplied by wind turbines in Northern Europe.
By Dieter Fries, Ingenieurbüro Fries, and Dirk Nielsen, Wind Nielsen, Germany
- Category: Articles
Using Solid State Batteries and Vibration Energy HarvesterAs energy companies continue to look for more renewable and clean sources of energy, wind energy offers an ideal solution. However, this brings concern about the potentially high maintenance costs primarily due to difficulty accessing the blades. Fortunately, with developments in the internet of things leading to improved condition monitoring tools, sensors can be placed on the blades to provide real-time data of their health at any time. This in turn can enable essential maintenance to be carried out before failure due to common issues such as delamination, cracks, impact or ice. Powering these sensors is key to success – if the sensors themselves power down, then so too does the benefit of having a condition monitoring system.
By Denis Pasero, Product Commercialisation Manager, Ilika Technologies, UK
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| #18 Nordex wind turbines installed at the Petkus wind farm in Germany (courtesy Tomasz Mokosinski) |
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