Abstract
This paper describes the feasibility analyses of an innovative, extensible ‘smart’ blade technology aims to significantly improve the wind turbine energy production. This innovative ‘smart’ blade will be extended at low wind speed to harvest more wind energy. It will be retracted to its original shape above rated wind speed, to protect the blade from possible damages under high wind speed. The extended blade, however, will inevitably increase the fatigue damage of the wind turbine blade of which fatigue demand, which often controls the design requirement of wind turbine blade. A rain-flow counting method is used for calculating stress range cycles during turbine blade operation. The analyzes model in the research is built based on a 100 kW utility-scale wind turbine installed on the campus of Case Western Reserve University with a data acquisition system installed on the wind turbine tower to monitor the operation data continuously over the years. In this analyses, the data set consists of four years’ wind speed data at 10-minutes time interval and blade rotational speed from March 2014 to February 2015 have been used. The results show that the fatigue damage of this extensible blade increased is acceptable considering its increased power output.
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