Lightweight Wind Turbines: Recent Innovations

Joining wind turbine blade sections together without adhesives reduces weight and improves bonding strength. The blade sections have tapered edges that can overlap. The overlapping tapered edges are joined by overlying laminates of composite material.

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Making wind turbine blades by stacking reinforcing strips and integrating them with an infusible strap that maintains alignment during molding and infusion. The method involves stacking multiple fiber-reinforced strips, strapping them tightly with an infusible strap, infusing resin into the stack, and curing to form a blade spar with the strap integrated. The strap allows handling long, heavy strips and prevents misalignment.

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A gearbox-free wind turbine that reduces the size, weight, and complexity of wind turbine components. The nacelle azimuth drives and pitch drives are implemented using planetary-gearbox-free electric actuator drives to reduce size and weight. The gearbox has a single or two stages using a toothed pin mechanism instead of a conventional planetary gearbox. The toothed pin gearbox provides torque conversion without multiple stages. Instead of a large planetary gearbox, toothed pin gears reduce complexity and size.

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Large-scale generator design that minimizes weight and cost while still maintaining the necessary rotor-stator spacing to prevent contact and failure. The generator uses a stack of annular rotors and stators with spacers between them. The rotors have inner and outer annular portions, with the magnet on the outer portion. The spacers brace the rotors to prevent axial displacement and provide the necessary spacing. The spacers have a smaller diameter section that fits between the rotors and a larger diameter section that the stators fit over. The rotors, spacers, and stators are held together with bolts through the center. This configuration allows using a central cylinder instead of a solid shaft, reducing rotor weight.

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A wind turbine system with multiple rotors that mitigates dynamic loads using individual pitch control of each rotor blade. This allows optimizing blade pitching to counteract gravity forces and reduce dynamic loads. The pitch adjustment system can receive lift commands from a control system that calculates the required blade pitching to generate lift opposite to gravity on each rotor module. This balances the forces and reduces vibration. The control system can use load estimates to optimize blade pitching and reduce loads further.

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Multi-segment rotor blade for horizontal-axis wind turbines that allows pitch angle control of each blade segment to optimize performance and reduce loads. The blade is made up of multiple segments that can rotate relative to each other to change the pitch angle. The blade segments are connected by guiding structures and actuating mechanisms that allow variable pitch between segments. This enables independent pitch control of each segment for optimal angle of attack and feathering. The blade design increases efficiency, reduces loads, and allows transportation of larger blades.

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A rotor blade for a wind turbine that reduces the risk of lightning strikes and improves the blade stiffness. The spar cap that runs along the length of the blade has layers of different composite materials. The layers near the blade root are a lightweight composite, while the layers near the tip are a stiffer composite. This reduces weight while providing sufficient stiffness for most of the blade. An electrically conductive foil is placed on the blade surface to intersect lightning and route it to grounding.

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Wind turbine blade with a lightweight and flexible design that allows improved power generation efficiency. The blade has an internal support structure and an external skin made of tensioned fabric. The fabric skin is supported along most of the blade length by elongated fabric supporting members that can slide along the blade. The tensioned fabric allows the blade shape to be actively controlled in response to wind conditions, optimizing performance. The fabric is lightweight, strong, tear-resistant, and has low air permeability.

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A method of making wind turbine blades with integrated load-bearing reinforcing strips that address the challenges of handling long, heavy pultruded strips. The method involves using a specialized feed apparatus to dispense the coiled pultruded strips into the blade mold. The feed apparatus confines the coil to prevent uncoiling. This allows feeding the strip into the mold while it uncoils in place. By fixing the coil and feeding from the free end, the potential energy is released safely.

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A rotor reinforcing device that reduces wind turbine blade weight while improving strength and stiffness compared to traditional wind turbine blades. The device uses thin, long blade reinforcing members connected to the blade and rotor hub to reinforce the rotor. This allows using lighter-weight materials for the main blade structure. A guide structure allows the reinforcing members to rotate independently of the blades. This provides reinforced blade performance without the need for heavy tension wires between blades. The device reduces blade weight while still meeting strength requirements.

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Method of making a wind turbine blade with a composite laminate structure that combines the benefits of dry fabric and pre-impregnated fabric. The blade layers are arranged in a staggered hybrid configuration where dry plies are interleaved with pre-impregnated (prepreg) plies. This allows the advantages of lower cost dry fabric to be combined with the benefits of easier handling and resin distribution of prepreg. The staggered layering offsets the dry and prepreg ply edges in the blade mold. The hybrid layup can also include reinforcing members and inserts.

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Balancing wind turbine rotors to reduce loads and vibrations by compensating for imbalances between blade centers of gravity while minimizing added mass. The balancing involves calculating the rotor imbalance magnitude and phase, and positioning the imbalance phase within a permissible range relative to blade reference positions. The permissible range is where loads are minimized.

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Wind harnessing device with a lightweight, simple and adjustable blade design for lower cost, weight and easy maintenance compared to conventional wind turbine blades. The device has an axle with poles extending out at each end and blade assemblies that can swing about their attachment points to the poles. This allows the blades to adjust their angle to the wind for improved efficiency compared to fixed angle blades. The swinging blade design allows the device to harness wind power from wider angles.

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One-piece strut design for ram air turbines that allows for more compact and efficient integration of generators. The strut has an integral gearbox section and drive section machined from a single piece of metal. The gearbox contains a bevel gear that transfers turbine rotation to a pinion gear on the driveshaft. This eliminates the need for a separate gearbox and allows the generator to be mounted closer to the turbine.

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A wind turbine with multiple rotors on a common tower structure that reduces loads on turbine parts compared to prior multirotor turbines. The turbine has a vertical tower with horizontal arms extending out. Each arm has a rotor hub at its end. The rotors are connected to the tower via a gear system that transfers rotational motion to a central generator. The gear system has pulleys that allow relative rotation between the rotor hub and tower, reducing loads on the tower arms and hub compared to a rigid connection.

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