Institution news
To view the full agenda and to register your place, please visit the event website.
Please could you briefly explain your role, involvement, and experience with regards to Structural Integrity and the Reducing Conservatism in Structural Integrity seminar?
Peter Greaves (PG): The rotor blades are some of the most critical components of the turbine system – they drive the energy yield, and catastrophic failure of one blade can lead to the collapse of the whole turbine under certain circumstances. It is therefore extremely important to develop modelling and testing techniques which can give stakeholders confidence that a blade design will withstand the extreme and fatigue loading that it will encounter over its service life of 25 years or more. As the latest generation of blades are now in excess of 120m long, the design constraints are becoming increasingly challenging! At the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult we operate one of the world’s largest blade test facilities, and develop more advanced methods of analysing and testing blades to ensure that owner-operators and blade OEMs can have confidence in their blades.
What, in your experience, has been the biggest roadblock for utilising new procedures and approaches in your sector?
PG: The design process for blades is heavily guided by certification bodies, and the standards and guidelines which the industry adopt are evolving much more slowly than the blades themselves! The standards have to fit everybody, from small OEMs making blades for onshore turbines to the huge offshore blades. This is a challenge, but the certification bodies do give credit for going above and beyond what is dictated by the standards.
What key topics are you excited to discuss at this year's conference?
PG: I’ll be looking at the overall design process for offshore wind turbines – how the design loads (which we apply to our FE models and during blade testing) are derived, the modelling approaches used in the FE models which validate the blade design, and finally what the full-scale certification tests involve.
What would you say are the technologies or applications to watch for the future?
PG: For wind turbine blades FE models are extremely complex, so typically shell element models are used. However, these models are not able to replicate some of the key failure modes which cause blades to fail in the field so there is interest in modelling blades with solid elements. This presents some challenges due to the computational intensity of this approach, and there are some interesting efforts with higher-order elements which would help with this issue.
Who else are you most interested in hearing from on the programme?
PG: I’m really interested to hear what is being done in the offshore, automotive and nuclear industries as many of the analysis techniques could potentially be applied in wind. As floating wind turbines become increasingly common the experience from the offshore industry is going to be invaluable to drive down the levelized cost of energy from wind.
Why is it important for engineers to join this conference?
PG: These conferences where people working in different sectors are able to get together to share knowledge around a specific theme are really important to transfer knowledge. I’m excited to hear how approaches to fracture mechanics from automotive and offshore oil and gas in particular could be transferred to wind energy.
The IMechE's Reducing Conservatism in Structural Integrity seminar takes place on 21 November 2023 in Manchester
The seminar will provide a technical forum for the safe exploration of new ideas and strategies for asset maintenance, monitoring and testing. Projects from both academia and industry will outline successes and lessons learned that can be applied across multiple industries, with examples from Automotive, Nuclear and Aerospace industries shared.
To view the full agenda and to register your place, please visit the event website.