Green Month Feature - Wind Turbine Technology from United Electronic Industries

Did you know that the UK is the windiest country in Europe?
*Insert your own joke here*

Wind has been the fastest growing renewable energy source in the last decade. China plans a 60% increase in the next three years, and the US a massive six-fold jump by 2030! The EU wants to produce 20% of its energy through renewables by 2020, with the majority coming from wind. One wind turbine can generate up to 6.5 million units of electricity each year: enough to run a computer for 2,250 years. Thats quite a long time.

It's really very simple -

• Wind turbines convert kinetic energy from the wind into mechanical energy.
• The blades catch the wind and turn the rotor, which is connected to the nacelle which houses all the workings for the turbine.
• The rotor turns a shaft which is connected to the gear box.
• The gear box is connected to a generator which converts the mechanical energy into electricity.
• The electricity is then sent to the National Grid.

With all this going on, it's really important to ensure these turbines operate safely, so strict monitoring is necessary. This usually involves a variety of sensors, including accelerometers, encoders, temperature sensors, oil/liquid level sensors, particle counter, voltage, current and humidity sensors.

UEI Cubes, and in particular, the UEIPAC, are ideal solutions for monitoring and controlling wind power generators. They are powerful enough to provide control for everything from blade angle to output voltage, and log everything from wind speed to power output. The UEIPAC’s easy access to Ethernet means it can easily run as a slave to a primary host PC when desired, but can take over and run stand-alone if anything happens to the primary communications link. The Cube’s rugged environmental specification eliminates the need for any heating or cooling in the control rack.

The standard UEIPAC cubes are tested from -40° to +85° C, at 50 g shock, 5 g vibration and altitudes up to 70,000 feet. All the I/O is also fully isolated from the controller, so the UEIPAC is almost totally immune to the glitches and spikes commonly seen in the grounds of an industrial environment.

We've also been speaking to customers who use UEI’s Cubes and RACKtangles as remote communications links in wind farms, where the system needs to consolidate RS-485 data from a series of turbines and send the data to the supervisory computer.

If you are working on an application that might benefit from a little more knowledge please get in touch with the Sarsen team on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email.

Have a great weekend!