The European project INNTERESTING aims to accelerate wind energy technology development and to extend the lifetime of wind turbine components. The full name of the project is “Innovative Future-Proof Testing Methods for Reliable Critical Components in Wind Turbines”. This project pursues the development of virtual and hybrid testing methods for prototype validation of pitch bearing and gearbox components, which are the components that will be developed within the selected case studies.
INNTERESTING, coordinated by the Technological Research Centre IKERLAN, has a budget of € 4.75 million and it is financed by the European Union´s H2020 Research and Innovation Program.
The goal of INNTERESTING is to develop a disruptive methodology to demonstrate the reliability of larger wind turbine critical components without the need of building larger test-benches in the future by overcoming size-dependent issues during design process and testing.
The INNTERESTING project is formed by a consortium that brings together eight partners from three European countries distributed as follows:
- Three R&D centres, IKERLAN (project coordinator, Spain), VTT (Finland), VITO (Belgium) and one university, KU Leuven (Belgium);
- In terms of industrial involvement, two manufacturers of wind turbine components (end-users of the technology designed): Laulagun (Spain), manufacturer of large bearings for both onshore and off-shore wind turbines, and Moventas (Finland), manufacturer of wind turbine gearboxes and related technologies;
- One player in the field of Computer-Aided Engineering simulation and testing solutions, Siemens Industry Software (Belgium);
- One non-profit private industry-driven organisation that integrates wide variety of stakeholders in the value chain of the energy sector, Basque Energy Cluster (Spain).