Goldwind Tower Cooling, Enercon Predictive Power Output Model

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week on Power-Up, Goldwind's coil pipe system for cooling towers, an idea from Enercon for a predictive model of power output under certain weather conditions, and an interesting alarm clock patent from the 1800s. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Our first idea is from Goldwind. It is a concept where they have a specialized coil pipe system for liquid cooling in wind turbines, mostly offshore it appears. It is designed to handle the rotation between the nacelle and the tower. So you can think about all this coiled tube in the tower itself and the nacelle is spinning around. So it Keeps everything organized, so it doesn't twist, bend, and kink where the fluid flow would stop. Phil, this one's a little interesting to me because I haven't seen a lot of cooling happening in towers, but obviously GoldWind wants to proceed with this idea to mostly for their offshore turbines, it looks like. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is designed for larger machines where they're gonna leverage either using the tower as a heatsink or some other downed tower mechanism where they can dump waste heat and theoretically minimize the size of the radiator that they have on the nacelle. And keep in mind that GoldWind, because they're using a permanent magnet generator, they have different requirements up tower for for the, the magnet cooling and stator cooling. So what's kind of fascinating about this to me is that, you've got certainly for, for transmitting, electrical. Current and things like that. You have things like slip rings. You even have kind of hydraulic slip rings when you want to be able to move, from a, from a rotating frame of reference to a fixed frame of reference, you, you can use kind of a, a, an equivalent of a hydraulic slip ring to, to pass fluid that way. This is literally like a twist loop the same way that we have kind of an electrical cable twist loop in the upper part of a, the tower and nacelle but it's specifically designed for liquid coolant. And so, kudos to them for kind of creativity and ingenuity. Whether or not this is going to be more efficient than a nacelle mounted radiator, I'm not. So it'd be interesting to see some feedback or some data on that, but it's it's definitely a unique and kind of fascinating way of developing a liquid based cooling system and implementing it in a way that's going to help them. Address other considerations, design considerations, like wanting to minimize the the volume and the, the size, and frankly, the weight of an uptower radiator or a cell mounted radiator. Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Waban Properties, and it is a concept for using weather data, in particular, more widespread weather data. coupled with performance of a wind turbine over time to create a predicted model for the power output under certain weather conditions. And this idea seems to be driven, Phil, from grid restoration or black start scenarios where they need to turn The grid on restarting the grid and they need to know what pow...