From structural design of blades to loads and control. Everything for tomorrow's wind turbines!
The Engineers from Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE) had much to share with an excited group of students from the Wind Energy Student Association (WESA) at DTU, Lyngby last Thursday.
On Thursday, 24 Oct, WESA proudly hosted SGRE at DTU. About 70 WESA Members from various study lines had the opportunity to interact with a team of highly specialized engineers from SGRE, most of whom graduated from DTU Wind Energy. Both parties were very keen on working together and the evening was proof of this keenness for a close industry-academia relationship.
Offshore Structural Blade Design
Martin Egelund Andersen and René Sørensen from the Offshore Structural Blade Design team delivered a detailed presentation on the challenges involved in designing large blades used for offshore wind turbines. They touched upon many interesting topics such as how SGRE’s patented Integral Blades are produced, how laser guidance is used for laying of glass fibre plies, the in-house tools they developed for technical decision making, etc. It was also interesting to see how close they are to the production facilities. Both Martin and René are based at SGRE’s Aalborg blade plant and are able to easily access personnel and facilities to see how they’re designs would play out in production.
Loads and Control
A short coffee break later, Driss Boutaleb and Stjepan Mahulja spoke on their journey from DTU Wind Energy to an exciting career in Loads and Control of wind turbines. They shared about the collaborative nature of their work, coordinating with different departments when going from design phase to loads validation. Driss spoke about how he performs large turbine load simulations every day and about the high-performance computing power he has access to at SGRE. Stjepan shared how he is able to go out into the field and tweak controller settings on a wind turbine prototype to study different aspects of the turbine’s operation. Driss and Stjepan shared a very fascinating video from a field study on safe turbine operation. The students got to see how the turbine behaves if only two blades are successfully pitched out during turbine shutdown.
Performance warranties and master thesis topics
Dominique Philipp Held, Performance Warranty Analyst at SGRE, brought his expertise on turbine performance assessment and warranties to the evening. He also touched upon his work with lidars for wind measurements, drawing upon his knowledge from a Masters and PhD from DTU Wind Energy.
The team from SGRE was also keen to collaborate with motivated master students for thesis projects. Safak Altun explained a few different possible thesis topics and welcomed students to work closely with him and his colleagues.
The event received very good feedback and WESA is grateful for the active participation of its members and SGRE for a successful evening!