ELITE: enhanced lightning effects testing capabilities

Abstract

Lightning related damages and costs are regarded being one of the larger issues for wind turbine operators in certain regions of the world, and the effort in improving designs, manufacturing quality and scheduled maintenance of modern wind turbines has become very important for the manufacturers. Since 2010, wind turbines may have been certified according the IEC 61400-24 Wind turbines - Part 24: Lightning protection, requiring verification of the applied protection measures. The present paper presents a new mean of verification, namely full scale lightning current testing on complete nacelles and wind turbine blades. The ELITE (Enhanced LIghtning effects TEsting) project starts by investigating the lightning exposure of wind turbines by gathering information from many research communities, wind turbine manufacturers, owners and operators of the systems. The scope of the data gathering is to investigate topics as attachment point distribution along blades, typical damage scenarios, current parameters of strikes to wind turbines, and eventually compile all the information into design and test requirements being basis for the generator design. The generator is designed to inject lightning current pulses (IEC LPL1) into full scale structures like 50-100m blades and 310MW nacelles. Such a test is conducted to investigate and validate the performance of the structures during the first short stroke, the subsequent short stroke and the long stroke of the IEC 61400-24.