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New blade tip concept to yield considerably more energy

Monday 22 Mar 21
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Contact

Flemming Rasmussen
Special consultant
DTU Wind
+45 46 77 50 48

Contact

Athanasios Barlas
Senior Researcher
DTU Wind
+45 93 51 10 71
The innovative SmartTip concept has potential to significantly reduce the cost of wind energy per year, implicitly displacing millions of tons of CO2 each year. It will support novel blade design business cases with potential increased export revenue in Denmark.

The project was started in 2017 and was just finalized in 2020. It explored design and testing of innovative blade tips for wind turbines which can increase the existing rotor size, producing significantly more energy per year, while mitigating loads in a smart way. Innovationsfonden invested 10,8 mil. kr. in the project which was a collaboration between DTU Wind Energy and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy in Denmark.

In the project, novel blade tips were designed through multi-fidelity surrogate aeroelastic model based optimization, which show a potential load neutral Annual Energy Production increase of 4-6%. Tip prototypes were manufactured and tested in the Large Scale Facility, in the Poul la Cour wind tunnel and in atmospheric rotating rig tests at DTU.

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Title photo above: Full-scale tip aeroelastic prototype tested in atmospheric conditions on the rotating test rig (DTU-Risø campus)

Photo below: Surrogate-based CFD optimized tip extension compared to a straight tip extension:

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Photo 3 - Free-shape direct CFD optimized tip extension compared to a straight tip extension:

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Photo 4  - Scaled tip aerodynamic prototype tested in the Poul la Cour wind tunnel (DTU-Risø campus)

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