With the rapid development of offshore wind power, "Deep Water and Far Shore" has become the main battlefield of the industry, and the large-scale wind turbine has become an important goal of most players in the industry. However, instances about commercial application of offshore wind power in China show that the existing generating capacity is sufficient to support the parity demand of offshore wind power projects. Once an enterprise addicts itself to the development mindset “Focus only on Big and New”, it is very likely to fall into the confusion of cause and effect. The key to get rid of the confusion lies in the way to ensure the stable operation of wind turbines and then to maximize power generation efficiency.
At the China Wind Power 2024, WINDEY's deep-sea exploration "tool" 16-18MW floating "Sea Eagle" is newly upgraded. For the product, WINDEY gives priority to safety and reliability in scientific and technological research, ensuring that wind turbines will operate steadily throughout the life cycle, thus the product has become the most welcome "Internet Celebrity" at the exhibition. Just join me to take a look at it on site.
Total Machine Coupling, Breaking Through Limits
As an energy "treasure-house" with great development value, the deep sea provides boundless space of imagination for the future development of offshore wind power, but its extreme "environment" has also become a hard nut awaiting solution in the generator set development. The WINDEY technical team has tackled the technical difficulties in floating integrated coupling, shattered the design barriers in all disciplines of machine-foundation structure, achieved the iterative collaborative design of machine-foundation integration, living up to qualitative leap in performance with a 50% increase in iteration efficiency and a 5% reduction in total machine load. Moreover, the upgraded "Sea Eagle" generator set adopts customized design in floating components, making it adapt to the floating-structure big swing and the harsher environment in the deep sea, ensuring the safety, stability, and reliability of the generator set in total machine design.
Dynamic Collaboration, Intelligent Stability Control
“No matter how frightening the waves are, I still keep calm”. To address the potential risks resulting from big swing of floating wind turbines and instability of the control system, the "Sea Eagle" generator set adopts advanced dynamic collaborative control technology, which can effectively reduce the power generation loss of floating generator set and ensure its power generation performance. For this generator set, WINDEY also adopts the world's leading floating load stability control technology, develops a sensor-based intelligent perception feed-forward control and multi-modal notch damping control strategy, and constructs a floating intelligent stability control system, which greatly reduces the swaying amplitude of the machine and ensures the high-reliability operation of the total machine system.
Lightweight Transmission, No Worries about Pitching
In view of the floating wind turbine’s special operating conditions and the integrated transmission system’s special connection mode, the "Sea Eagle" generator set is equipped with the brand-new generation of high-load, high-power-density, lightweight medium-speed integrated transmission system. WINDEY has developed a real-time online deformation monitoring system to monitor the displacement of the transmission system spindle in real time during operation. Based on the monitoring data, the generator set evaluates the impact on important parameters such as gearbox lubrication system and gearbox meshing state after deformation, in order to improve the operation reliability of the transmission system.
In addition, to deal with the possible pitching limit of floating generator set during operation, WINDEY also designed a real-time oil level monitoring and oil return system for the "Sea Eagle" generator set, to ensure that the lubricating oil returns to the transmission system in time while avoiding overflow. That resolves such problems as oil leakage risk and insufficient lubricating oil of the floating transmission system.
Test Leads the Way, Solving Difficulties in Advance
Simulating the mechanical characteristics and engineering phenomena of generator sets in deep-sea environment, testing and analyzing test objects’ capabilities such as load, motion, and structural dynamic response in complex environments, reproducing extreme tests such as hurricane, strange waves, and deep-water rapids... At the exhibition site, WINDEY exhibited a high-precision scale model of the "Sea Eagle" generator set for pool test, drawing the attention of visitors present.
Given the limitations of simulation software, the scale model pool test is an indispensable and vital link for verifying the design scheme. The WINDEY technical team has built a floating hybrid model that integrates generator set, foundation, and mooring for collaborative control. In strict accordance with the development process "Comprehensive concept design - numerical simulation analysis - scale model test -prototype verification in sea test", the technical team has carried out wind/wave/current model tests under operating and survival conditions, completed the closed-loop verification for the design consistency of the "Sea Eagle" generator set, and resolved the possible hard nuts and headaches in advance before the generator set is put into production, providing strong technical supports for the generator set’s safe launch.
The Eagle Hovers High in the Sky, Aiming at the Far-reaching Goal. The 16-18MW floating "Sea Eagle" generator set inherits WINDEY's excellent typhoon-resistant technology DNA and boasts superior power generation performance, so that it can adapt to the extremely harsh wind/wave/current conditions in the deep sea, and is perfectly suitable for floating application scenarios with a water depth of 60 meters and above. Now, the brand-new "Sea Eagle" generator set has fully passed the closed-loop verification in the total model scale pool test, and various application technologies are nearly perfected. As a national key scientific research project, the "Sea Eagle" generator set will soon be put into commercial operation for the first time in the prototype test wind farm of the PowerChina Hainan Wanning offshore Floating Project. It will fully meet the development needs of deep and far-sea areas such as Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan, and strongly guide China's wind power development to march into the “Deep Blue”. In the future, WINDEY will continue to deepen the implementation of the "Double Sea" strategy, and adopt measures such as improving the test platform and furthering the development of intelligent maintenance technology to ensure the operation safety of wind turbines, with a view to actively promoting the high-quality development of China's offshore wind power industry.
