Ahmad Hemami received his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tehran and his PhD in System Dynamics and Control from the Department of Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Salford, UK. Dr Hemami has several years of industrial, academic and research experience. Among his areas of expertise are robotics, control and automation, and wind energy. He has supervised several MS and PhD students, and has served as a consultant for industry. He has over 100 journal and conference publications. He is an adjunct professor at McGill University (Montreal, Canada).Enercon Acquisition of Lagerwey Enables Competitive Product Evolution with PMG Technology
- Published: 27 February 2018 27 February 2018
Towards the end of 2017 the news regarding Enercon making an acquisition of fellow direct drive turbine OEM Lagerwey indicated a wind energy market that is still in the process of consolidating. The outcome of this deal will have specific benefits for Enercon as they position themselves for the next 10 years and attempt to regrow their market share and assert their global presence.
By Philip Totaro, CEO, IntelStor
Digital content aggregation and data licensing is a well-established business practice for digitally enhanced services in other industries. With the advent of digital transformation in renewable energy, this industry has an opportunity in front of it to share more of the data which companies have amassed on asset performance and health.
In ten years the wind energy industry could see an upper limit to onshore turbine technology development reached. Offshore turbines of 12–15MW nameplate rating should be fairly common by then, but can we really expect onshore turbines to approach 10MW? As we continue to push the boundaries of product and technology development, we are likely to find that physical size limits, as well as the limits of the ‘square-cube’ law, put large onshore turbines at a commercially competitive disadvantage.
A wind turbine nacelle made from structural fabric? A tower made from composites? Blades with metal mesh inserts for structural rigidity? They might not be that far away. The greatest challenge for wind turbine blade structural and manufacturing engineers is to implement the idealised performance and noise-mitigated designs of aerodynamics engineers. Limitations of previous generations of manufacturing technology and the reliance on lower-cost materials have limited the type of spar/shear web structures which could be used.
The implementation of wireless technology using the 802.11s standard and mesh network technology will revolutionise wind turbine and wind park control systems. The increased signal fidelity and packet routing central to this technology will allow more WiFi-enabled sensor networks to be implemented on wind turbine blades. Previous attempts at fully instrumented blade monitoring using optical fibre sensors were expensive and limited in fidelity due to reliability issues. While the subject of WiFi use in pitch control, SCADA and content management systems (CMS), and other communication uses in wind turbines has been discussed for many years, some of the same constraints related to bandwidth and system reliability in the face of lightning strikes and 20-year design life have thus far precluded commercial use.
As of the end of June 2017, digital services in wind energy had seen deployment to over 55GW of assets, but to less than 1GW of offshore wind. The majority of the features and capabilities which can be delivered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, or otherwise leverage data analytics and internet of things (IoT) systems, are likely to be agnostic to both onshore and offshore wind. Nevertheless, the potential impact on O&M cost as well as energy output optimisation will have specific implications in an offshore wind market segment.