Innovation
Torture testing wind turbines at an abandoned naval base
A World War II-era warehouse has become the proving grounds for prototype turbines from companies like GE.
An abandoned World War II-era warehouse in an impoverished part of South Carolina is now a $110 million engineering facility -- and the proving grounds for the next generation of wind turbines, Businessweek reports.
As companies such as General Electric and Vestas Wind Systems design bigger, more reliable turbines, they’ll bring their prototypes here to run them through a battery of tests to simulate some of the harshest weather conditions imaginable.
“The idea is to break them, so we know how and where these turbines and drivetrains fail over time,” says John Kelly of the Clemson University Restoration Institute, which houses the new testing facility.
The naval base where the new 82,000-square-foot Energy Innovation Center now sits was closed in 1995. In 2009, Clemson won a $45 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy; Clemson then raised an additional $53 million for the project. SCE&G, Duke Energy, and the SmartState Program also contributed.
The facility is centered around two giant test rigs (pictured) called dynamometers: hydraulic devices that can replicate the rotation and bending forces that a wind turbine places on a drivetrain, Businessweek explains. (The drivetrain takes energy generated by a turbine’s blades and increases the rotational speed to drive the electrical generator, similar to the transmission in a car.)
Wind turbine manufacturers will lease the testing rigs for months at a time. GE is expected to be the facility’s first industrial partner.
The testing facility comes online as the U.S. wind industry is growing faster than it ever has. According to the Energy Department, wind energy last year became the No. 1 source of new U.S. electricity generation capacity for the first time ever, representing 43 percent of all new electric additions and accounting for $25 billion in U.S. investment... Still, wind accounts for only about 3.5 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S.
[Clemson University media release via Businessweek]
Images: Clemson University
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com