An EU-funded project has launched that aims to accelerate wind energy technology development and to extend the lifetime of turbine components.
Innovative Future-Proof Testing Methods for Reliable Critical Components in Wind Turbines (INNTERESTING), coordinated by the Technological Research Centre IKERLAN, has a budget of €4.75m and it is financed by the European Union´s H2020 Research and Innovation Programme.
The project is focused on the development of innovative virtual and hybrid testing methods for prototype validation of pitch bearing and gearbox components.
The components that will be developed within the selected case studies.
INNTERESTING aims to develop a disruptive methodology to demonstrate the reliability of larger wind turbine critical components without the need of building larger test-benches in the future by overcoming size-dependent issues during design process and testing.
The current product development process for wind turbines relies on a validation method that combines physical and virtual testing.
While more advanced virtual modelling techniques are becoming available, it is still necessary to perform large-scale (full-size) physical tests to demonstrate reliability of new and larger wind turbine components.
The full-size physical tests are the final step and the most expensive and time-consuming part of the product development process.
To deal with bigger wind turbines, such critical tests require increasingly larger and more expensive test benches.
Therefore, it is essential to provide European companies with the most advanced testing methodologies and to design tools to help them find innovative solutions accelerate their commercialisation.
The INNTERESTING project is formed by a consortium that brings together eight partners from three European countries including IKERLAN in Spain, VTT in Finland and VITO in Belgium, as well as one university, KU Leuven also in Belgium.
Industrial partners include Laulagun in Spain and Moventas in Finland.