Vestas Turbine Sway Reduction, Concrete Tower Pre-Tensioning

On Power-Up today, a pre-tensioning mechanism for concrete towers,
Vestas' idea for reducing sway in towers, and the patent behind the
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Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off
the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with
me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the
weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your
energy future. Allen Hall: Alright, our first idea comes from the
brain of Max Boegl Wind AG, and it is a really unique patent. When
you deal with concrete towers, like you see on Nordex turbines,
some Acciona turbines, where they stack the concrete cylinders on
one another. Have you ever asked yourself, how do those keep from
tipping over and everything landing on the ground? Well, there's a
series of tension cables inside of there that keeps those things
stacked up properly and provides pressure the whole time. That is a
really tricky system. And this patent idea, which is a pretension
element, It creates these, this mechanism to provide tension and
simply on these concrete towers so they don't fall over and don't
come apart like kids blocks. And Phil, this one I think is being
used, right? I would assume a this technique, because it's really
unique and simple and effective, has to be out in service already.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, and we believe it's being used on some of
their hybrid concrete and steel tube towers. So just for
everybody's benefit too, this is kind of a pretensioned tower
anchor concept where you know, the, the benefit of that is, is if
you, if you want to be able to control the amount of, of load and
deflection pre tensioning can kind of help facilitate that versus
post tensioning something where once you've already poured concrete
and it's hardened, there's only so much kind of post tensioning you
can do without overstressing either the tendons or the concrete
itself, which, which could weaken it. So pre tensioning this allows
you to You know, have the, the correct amount of tension in the
tendons and, and the bolt the anchor bolts. And then when you're
laying in your concrete it's, it's going to help facilitate the,
the strength and reliability of that connection. Now, what's also
kind of fascinating about this is that we haven't, we've seen, kind
of pre tensioning and post tensioning used in different areas of,
of the turbine before where some of the companies, Vestas, I think,
tried a a post tensioned tower with die cables and things like
that. So, there, there have been companies that have tried
different arrangements and techniques before but it was never
really widely adopted, but Max Bogle, obviously has the, the
pedigree in, in wind energy to have this more widely adopted and
the hybrid towers that they've been deploying. I believe number
more than like three or four hundred at this point that they've got
deployed mostly throughout Europe, I believe. So, this is fantastic
technology and, and again, great to see that somebody's, capturing
IP on a technology that they're actually rolling out commercially
and, and, getting the commercial benefit out of leveraging. Joel
Saxum: I think an important note here, pre tensioning. So just to
give example if you're not familiar with concrete pre tensioning or
post tensioning, think of the most, the easiest example of concrete
pre tensioning is when they make, when you make a bridge beam. And
you see the bridge beams have a little bit of an arc to them, kind
of? How that was made is, You put cables through a form, you pour
concrete in the form, and while that form is still wet, you put
tension on those cables on the outsides of the form, so they
actually, like, they'll pull on the inside, and then once the
concrete sets, you release the form, and now it puts pressure on
that concrete, and concrete is always by strength of how well it's
pushed together. So PSI, the pressure of concrete, is how strong it
is usually. So when that, When that pretensioning is done, it makes
the connection stronger. It makes the piece stronger. It makes
everything stronger. So that's the technology they're using here.
So switching gears to going, how is this used in the field or what
does it look like? In the United States, we don't have a whole lot
of concrete towers. And in general, concrete towers aren't that
widely used. To my knowledge, I'm not a developer. I haven't looked
into the commercial models or the business case for concrete versus
steel, but I know steel is pretty dang easy to just roll to site
and boom, boom, boom, put up. So I think that's why we see more
steel ones than, than concrete. But technology like this may change
that in the future. Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Vestas and
they have a patent and really a really strong idea. About the
control system and their turbines when the turbine isn't pointed in
the right direction. So they can get yaw off center from where it
needed to be. It's not really pointed in the wind. And that can
cause the tower to sway. And once the tower starts to sway, that
can set off an alarm and shut everything down. Which you don't
necessarily want to do. So this patent idea looks at where the yaw
error is and derates that switch, the vibration switch on the sway.
They say, Hey, we're just out of yaw. Let's get back in the right
direction. And that swaying that is happening will go away. So it's
like a temporary way of reducing this control system so that the
turbine continues to operate and produce maximum power. It's a
really complicated thing though, because as Phil, as turbines have
gotten more instrumentation and more control systems, there's
turbine than there ever used to be. And tower sway is one of those.
This tries to deal with some of the unique situations that pop up
with yaw. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and, and what's kind of interesting
about this is you're, you're right, because we, we now have,
algorithms in the Turbine Controller that you would think would
overlap or compete with each other. You've got yaw angle
optimization for controlling wake. You've got pitch angle
optimization for performance or noise. And so there's all kinds of
things that you might be be doing at the same time. And I think
this is a solution that they came up with specific to a problem
they might've had with a specific tower frequency or something like
that, where, you were getting this, this oscillation and you want
to be able to leverage the, the yaw errors and input to. This
algorithm that, that's basically going to determine, how do you
reduce the amount of wobble? We were talking off air about this is
almost like, if you've got like high speed wobble on a, on a, well,
I get it on my scooter my electric scooter, sometimes you gotta
lean forward or throttle back a little bit to be able to, just get
out of that oscillation window and then you can get back to, to
normal operation. Joel Saxum: I think that these problems didn't
exist a long time ago, right? If you think about this is a Vestas
patent, right? Yes. So if you think about a V47, a V47, it's stout
blades, not a whole lot of flexibility, not a whole lot of
movement, not a big tall tower, not 70 meter long blades. So it
could handle vibration a bit better. Whether that's vortex induced
vibration, of the tower with wind going past it, or it's, Vibration
induced by the rotating equipment within the tower. Now as you get,
we're getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This patent's from
2021. So that was right when Vestas was coming out with like the,
the V 150. Now we're in the V 163. So these things are getting
bigger, taller, longer blades. So they're a lot more sensitive to,
Motion induced or rotational imbalances induced issues within the
turbine. So they're coming up with, controller methodologies to fix
some of these problems. I think that's something we definitely have
to be doing as it's going to get as we get larger and larger. And I
think you'll see more and more OEMs having to chase this same
dragon. Allen Hall: For our fun patent a week, we go to Hollywood
and some of the most famous patents that we actually use today have
come from Hollywood. The Marx Brothers were involved in a number of
patents and products that are used in aerospace today. Hedy Lamarr,
the famous actress, has a patent for frequency hopping, which is a
way that we transmit signals and code today around the world. Well,
this one is a little more common usage in that it's a special pair
of shoes that you have seen these shoes, if you've watched MTV
before, in Michael Jackson, in that video Smooth Criminal. And when
you see Michael Jackson sort of lean forward, you're like, Oh man,
that's amazing. How did he do that without falling over? Well, he
had invented a special shoe and in this shoe is a little slot in
the heel is a slot and it picks up a bolt head that's built into
the floor, so you kind of lock yourself into the floor and you can
lean forward. And Michael Jackson is one of the inventors of this
system, Phil. It's quite interesting that they went ahead and
patented it. to keep others from copying it. Philip Totaro: Well,