Show notes
Allen Hall and Joel Saxum interview Dr. Elif Ecem Bas, a PhD project engineer at R&D Test Systems in Denmark. Dr. Bas discusses how R&D Test Systems is leveraging digital twin technologies and hybrid testing to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of testing wind turbine components, particularly pitch bearings.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. As wind turbines grow in size and complexity, testing these components has become increasingly expensive and time consuming. To address these challenges, R&D Test Systems is leveraging digital twin technologies to improve the efficiency of their test bed.
Benches, ultimately reducing testing time and costs. And if you don't already know, R&D Test Systems is a leading company in the wind energy industry, providing testing solutions for wind turbine components on a massive scale. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Ecem Bas, a PhD project engineer.
At R&D Test Systems in Denmark, Dr. Bas earned her PhD in structural engineering from the University of Nevada, Reno, and is currently focusing on digital twin technologies at R&D Test Systems. In this interview, we will delve into the applications of digital twin technology and wind turbine component testing and learn more about Dr.
Bas's work in this cutting edge field. Ecem, Welcome to the program.
Elif Ecem Bas: Thank you. And thanks a lot for the introduction.
Allen Hall: So there's a lot to learn here because Joel and I have been following the digital twin saga over the last several years because you see a lot of of news articles and information about digital twins and OEMs or have been looking at it and a lot of smaller companies have been trying to prove out digital twins.
But we haven't seen a lot of it being applied in a place where I think it's important, which is in the testing phase. And R&D Test Systems if you haven't worked with R&D Test Systems, build some of the largest pieces of test equipment in the world to test generators up to 25 megawatts and all kind of blades, just insanely big things.
So what is the benefit of using Digital Twin on such large test equipment?
Elif Ecem Bas: Let's come one step back. As you mentioned in your introduction. Testing is necessity for all the wind turbine components and their subcomponents as well. This is required by the standards and this is required by the design and also the manufacturing.
So we will not get rid of testing. Testing is very important. But as the wind turbines are getting bigger and bigger, this time to test these components takes also a lot of time. And for as an example for a blade to test the Fatigue test to make a fatigue test for a blade. It takes one year or more than a year to do the saw
Joel Saxum: Constant movement.
Elif Ecem Bas: Yeah, exactly to see all the damages through the blade. You have to do that and also for a highly accelerated lifetime testing of an assault. This also takes six and eight months and also testing this. These are large facilities, right? And testing this will also cost money. tens of million euros bought to establish and run this.
And this leads, of course, longer time to market. For new and more powerful wind turbines. In detail systems, we are trying to develop digital tools to overcome these challenges and to have these turbines to roll onto the market. So and also yeah, cut cost on it. And what we are using digital twins in the testing, it is very necessary because we would like to reduce the cost of the down time in the testing itself, in the test execution itself.
Allen Hall: So there are portions of testing, from my understanding, and I'm an electrical engineer and I'm a mechanical engineer, but I've spent about a lot of structural testing. Those tests take a long time, they're very expensive, but sometimes the result we get out of those tests isn't very useful in the real world.
On the other side of this, you've got two problems. One is that, does the test match what's happening in service? That's a really great question. The second half is, how much do you know about this product before you start testing it? Or are you testing the way? You're touching the engineering aspects properly to evaluate that for the real world.
And I think you, you run into two problems here and I want to understand this part first, which is you model the component, but you don't model all aspects of it. And I want to, I Can you walk through that a little bit, like what you're trying to do with a device, a blade, or a gearbox, or anything else, a pitch bearing?
Elif Ecem Bas: As you mentioned, there are two aspects. So in the component test, we just take one component and test it, right? And with our, Digital twin technologies, we focus on both simulating the complete system, whereas we only test one component and model the remaining parts. So this is one thing, and we call this hybrid testing because one part is tested experimentally, whereas the remaining components are modeled numerically.
And we do this in In a closed loop system where we share at every time step, we share the commands and feedbacks with the test bench. So this is one aspect where we test. Only one component, let's say it is the pitch bearing, and model the remaining part, which is the blade and the hub and the other parts, the other blades.
Allen Hall: Alright, so that's interesting. That's a complicated model though, right? When you try to do that.
Elif Ecem Bas: Exactly.
Allen Hall: So you have to simplify it so you can model it. How are you finding those sort of the key characteristics so you can model it on a test bench properly?
Elif Ecem Bas: Why we do hybrid testing? Hybrid testing is to get the both advantages from the experimental world and from the analytical world.
So we do hybrid testing for the components that we cannot model properly. In this case, it is, we choose that it is the pitch bearing because it's very hard to model.
Joel Saxum: Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
Elif Ecem Bas: Yeah. And also the pitch bearing itself. So bearings are designed to roll, right? But the pitch bearing is rolling a little bit and then exposed to the bending moments for their lifetime.
So it's against to its own nature. So this is why also predicting the failure mechanisms of the pitch bearing is a bit hard. Another thing is, when it is failed, it is very hard to backtrace what was the cause of this failure, because you cannot model it properly. So what we are doing is, since this part is hard to model, we put it in an experimental setup.
And the blade and the remaining part, the other kinematics are relatively easier to model.
Joel Saxum: That's a good word. Relatively. Yeah.
Elif Ecem Bas: And so it took that part and we use that simplified models to apply more realistic loading scenarios to the pitch bearing. In order to get its behavior.
Joel Saxum: A question here like Allen said earlier pitch bearings is a headache for, man, what would you say, 90 percent of the people we talk to, Allen? Oh, easily, yes. When we're thinking about you guys advancing the testing mechanism for us, because it's, it is, just, if you picture it in your head, It is, a bearing is designed for that rolling surface, however, this not only is exposed to the root bending moment of the blades, basically, on a fulcrum, pulling and pushing on it, but it's also having gravitational loads at the exact same time, going up, sideways, down so you have this really complex load scenario.
You guys coming forth with something that could hopefully accelerate lifetime testing,
Elif Ecem Bas: Yeah. Also, we are looking into testing extreme cases in this scenario. So picking up extreme wind load event and test this and hopefully see the development of a failure with the test.
Joel Saxum: That with everybody with pitch bearings.
If you talk to anybody in the manufacturing sector, it's it's really hard to do an accelerate at any kind of lifetime testing. For that pitch, because it isn't when you look at it in the crate, right? That is a robust piece of metal. That's a big, bad thing, right? If anybody's ever seen one of these it's impressive how big it is and how heavy it is and how much steel there is.
But to test that you can't you can't do a life cycle test in six months on that thing. It's just not possible.
Elif Ecem Bas: Exactly. And also what. We hear from the test centers that they cannot see the failures with this highly accelerated lifetime test on it. So what we are looking into, okay, we have this extreme load case scenario.
Can we apply this with hybrid testing and can we see the development of the failure of this component?
Allen Hall: Let me ask you about the complexities of pitch bearing, because I think Joel brought it up at a really high level, but I want to focus in, drill down to how complex this is. So you have this massively long blade, right?
The blades are getting longer, so the center of gravity is moving further and further out, the center of lift on them is moving also, the blades are flexing, right? Then you got the gravitational pull. piece. But on top of that, now you've added a control system in the turbine, which is pitching the blades as they rotate around the 360.
So you have this,