The first I-Love-Windpower social event was held in Utrecht on friday the 23rd of June.
Nine introduction presentations have been presented of each active project (3 field and 6 tech). These presentations have been recorded and can be seen back here below.
Mali – The Mali project is – after a long break – preparing to start up again. The lessons learned, the unexpected additional challenges and the next steps are presented by Joost Sterenborg.
Tanzania – Roland Valckenborg shares his experiences and presents his future plans. Besides technical and business challenges (like ensuring adequate level of material quality), he also shares cultural challenges like how to shape enough “Pamoja” that seems to be a necessity in Tanzania before anything can become a success.
Brasil – Marco Ogno presents the ongoings of the Brasil project and presents his strategy of to shape a local stable and self-sustaining training center. Special focus is how to get the everso-important right commitment on the table of all relevant stakeholders in this new-born project.
Schoondijke test field – Marko Bosman tells about the project of installing and monitoring two – Hugh Piggott design – windturbines. Thanks to some great summer storms, it ended up not only comparing the power outputs but also the reliabilities against other small wind turbines.
FAST model project – Good models can support the design development of small wind turbines. By means of simulations – one can check the behaviour in a cost-effective manner (don’t need to spend money on materials for iterative designs, safe (only the program can crash) and fast (do not have to wait for that extreme gust to occur).
Lukas Kuijken, Bram Lof, Dieter Castelein and Gert Cool – students from European Wind Energy Master at the TU Delft – are spending their free time building a wind turbine model in the (certified) open-source code FAST. They choose the Hugh Piggott design with a 1.8 m rotor diameter because it can be validated easier. They are being supervised by Manuel Almeida – a wind turbine load specialist from the R&D department of a large wind turbine manufacturer. Lukas presents the proceedings of this project.
Generator modeling – Håvard Hartviksen is working on a generator model in COMSOL. The model can support generator design developments in the future. He presents his proceedings and goes in on model decisions he needed to make along the way.
Site assessment – Vasilis Michalopoulos is building up competences in site assessment. It is very important to know the wind conditions of a site in order to shape the right expectancies to all stakeholders. Furthermore it is needed in order to be able to make fact-driven decisions on sensible turbine sizes and tower heights. Vasilis currently supports the Schoondijke test field power curve measurements by filtering and correcting the available data via WaSP. He thereby gets acquainted with the software.
Low-budget SCADA design – Affordable windspeed loggers are important to get insight in energy harvest potential of a certain rural region – information that is common very scarce in developing rural areas. Windspeed loggers are key to being able to make fact-driven decisions. Unfortunately, these systems are quite expensive and out of reach for most starting projects.
Ryan Helmer and Julián González are building a SCADA system with GPRS functionality trying to keep the costs below 400 euro’s! The extreme cheap and large community around the Arduino platform seems to make this challenge realistic. They present their proceedings sofar.
Wooden tower design – Towers are expensive and can pose high safety risks if designed unreliable. Limited local supply chain in developing countries can lead to unfair monopoly positions ending up in extreme costly towers. Therefore it is important to have product diversification based on different materials. Jasper Koot – with almost 10 years of constructing experience – and a team of engineers from a foundation design consultancy corporate are looking into wooden tower designs. The first prototype has been build and also lessons learned from mapping design decisions to production complexity are shared.