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At least 433 records · Page 24

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DOE OSTI2026

Digital Twin-Enabled Adaptive Control for Hydroelectric Systems: Turbine Governor and Voltage Regulation

This paper presents a comprehensive digital twin (DT) framework for hydroelectric systems that enables adaptive control of turbine governors and excitation systems without requiring detailed manufacturer specifications. The proposed framework integrates neural network-based system identification with stabilizing adaptive control laws for the installed turbine controller and middle-branch adaptive tuning for the installed voltage regulator. Using real operational data from Unit C-8 at Rocky Reach Dam (1,349 MW capacity), highfidelity neural network models are developed to capture turbine and generator dynamics without requiring detailed manufacturer specifications. The DT enables safe controller synthesis and validation in simulation before deployment. For turbine control, the proposed method achieves a 79.9% mean square error (MSE) reduction compared with that of an optimal controller. For voltage regulation, the adaptive excitation controller achieves approximately 42.6% MSE reduction while preserving installed protection logic. The results demonstrate that DT technology provides a practical pathway for modernizing hydropower control systems with minimal operational disruption.

Gui, Yonghao [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000250435534)↗

DOE OSTI2023

Valuation of Distributed Wind Turbines Providing Multiple Market Services

The role of wind turbines has traditionally been limited to providing energy capacity to the grid, but the availability of smart inverters and recent regulatory changes provide the technical and policy capability for wind turbines to also provide ancillary services. However, in contrast to the technical and policy aspects, the valuation of distributed wind turbines providing such services has not been thoroughly studied. This paper presents an optimal market-participation method for distributed wind turbines and valuates different strategies in California Independent System Operator’s balancing area. The services include energy capacity, regulation up and down, and reserves. An optimization problem is formulated to determine optimal power output for each service and demonstrated using historical data for one complete year. The revenues from multiple services are quantified, and a sensitivity analysis is performed to relate market prices with revenues. It is found that the optimal strategy generates 6% more revenue compared to the revenue from participating in the energy market only. Also, the reduced energy prices in future scenarios increase the relative importance of market participation in ancillary services.

Bhatti, Bilal Ahmad↗

DOE OSTI2022

Blackstart Capability and Survivability of Wind Turbines with Fully Rated Converters

We report the blackstart capability of wind turbines is critical for the recovery of wind-dominant power systems from blackouts. If wind power plants are not able to restore a power system, the incorporation of wind resources into electric grids could be limited by blackstart capability. This paper tackles this problem by setting forth a grid-forming controller for Type 4 wind turbines which employ fully rated power converters. To this end, we engineer two-axis anti-windup proportional-integral regulators that serve to ride through restoration disturbances. We also design an active protection system to prevent wind turbines from stalling during recovery from blackouts. We demonstrate in a high-fidelity simulation environment that Type 4 wind turbines with the developed controllers and protection subsystem can: (i) re-energize a notional wind-dominant grid; (ii) ride through asymmetrical faults; and (iii) survive low wind speed events.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

Loads on a Jacket-Supported Wind Turbine During Hurricane Sandy Simulation

Abstract The dynamic response of a jacket-supported offshore wind turbine under coupled wind, wave, and current fields during Hurricane Sandy is the subject of this study. To illustrate the detailed procedure related to the response evaluation of a 5-MW offshore wind turbine with a jacket support structure, we consider a single site where the water depth is 50 m. Loads are computed using two simulation tools, fast and abaqus, with partial coupling. Aerodynamic loads on the turbine rotor are first evaluated using a wind turbine model in fast with a fixed base; then, these rotor aerodynamic loads are applied as point loads at the top of a model of a tower that is supported by a jacket structure in abaqus. On the basis of stochastic simulations, we discuss the applicability of the abaqus jacket modeling and describe the characteristics and comparisons of the aerodynamic and hydrodynamic effects on loads on the jacket members. Details related to the structural model and soil–pile interaction model employed in the analyses are also discussed.

Engineering↗

DOE OSTI2022

Characterizing Flow Instabilities During Transient Events in the Turbine Rim Seal Cavity

Abstract Gas turbine engine design requires considerations not only for long-term steady operation but also for critical transient events. Aircraft engines undergo significant stress during takeoff and landing, while power generation turbines must be flexible for hot restarts as renewable energy sources come online and offline. During these transient cycles, engines sustain wear and degradation that can lead to a reduction in the lifespan of their components and more frequent, costly maintenance. Cooling flows are often used to mitigate these effects, but can lead to complex and problematic flow interactions. This study uses high-frequency response pressure probes and heat flux gauges in the rim seal cavity of a one-stage research turbine to characterize the properties of large-scale flow structures during transient operation. A continuous-duration turbine testing facility provides the ability to assess the importance of these transients by first reaching steady-state operation before imposing transient behaviors. Although previous studies have conducted similar measurements for steady purge flows and wheel speeds, varying these parameters to simulate transient effects revealed several unique phenomena not identifiable with discrete steady measurements. The measurement approach connects the varied transient parameter to the behavior of the flow structures to enable a better understanding of the type of instability observed and the root cause of its formation. In particular, a relationship between instability cell formation and rim sealing effectiveness was identified using experimental data and was supported through computational simulations.

Engineering↗

DOE OSTI2022

Bearing Fault Detection on Wind Turbine Gearbox Vibrations Using Generalized Likelihood Ratio-Based Indicators

Studies in condition monitoring literature often aim to detect rolling element bearing faults because they have one of the biggest shares among defects in turbo machinery. Accordingly, several prognosis and diagnosis methods have been devised to identify fault signatures from vibration signals. A recently proposed method to capture the rolling element bearing degradation provides the groundwork for new indicator families utilizing the generalized likelihood ratio test. This novel approach exploits the cyclostationarity and the impulsiveness of vibration signals independently in order to estimate the most suitable indicators for a given fault. However, the method has yet to be tested on complex experimental vibration signals such as those of a wind turbine gearbox. In this study, the approach is applied to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Wind Turbine Gearbox Condition Monitoring Round Robin Study data set for bearing fault detection purposes. The data set is measured on an experimental test rig of a wind turbine gearbox; hence the complexity of the vibration signals is similar to a real case. The outcome demonstrates that the proposed method is capable of distinguishing between healthy and damaged vibration signals measured on a complex wind turbine gearbox.

condition monitoring↗

DOE OSTI2023

Open Source High Fidelity Modeling Of A Type-5 Wind Turbine Drivetrain

The purpose of this code is to provide a high-fidelity model of Type-5 wind turbine drivetrain for grid integration and transient stability studies. The increasing integration of renewable energy resources in evolving bulk power system (BPS) is impacting the system’s inertia. Type-5 wind turbine generation has the potential to behave like a traditional synchronous generator and can help mitigate the aforementioned impact. A hydraulic torque converter (TC) and gearbox with torque limiting feature are integral parts of a Type-5 wind turbine unit. A generic and high-fidelity model of a Type-5 wind turbine drivetrain is not openly and widely available for grid integration and transient stability studies. This hinders appropriate assessment of Type-5 wind power plant's contribution to the BPS resilience. This work develops and validates a TC model based on those generally used in automobile's transmission system.

Hussain, Tanveer↗

DOE OSTI2024

via-wind (A Visual Impact Assessment Tool for Wind Turbines) [SWR-24-87]

Via-wind is an open-source tool for conducting visual impact assessments for wind turbines. It combines geographic information system (GIS) and 3D simulation methods to account for the key factors driving the visual impact of installed wind turbines, including distance, viewing angle, turbine orientation, visual exposure, and the cumulative effects of multiple turbines. This software is optimized for use in high-performance computing environments to enable large scale (e.g., country-wide) analysis, but can also be run on a single server or personal computer. For more information, please see the related journal article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261924021846

Lopez, Anthony↗

DOE OSTI2025

An accumulation method for early fault warning and its application to wind turbine systems

Unexpected failures in engineering systems lead to expensive maintenance actions and should be avoided if at all possible. This is particularly true for wind turbine systems for which unexpected failures not only demand costly repairs but also cause long downtime. Motivated by this need, we present an accumulation method for fault early warning and failure anticipation. Here, our research shows that one critical element allowing the ability of early warning is to accumulate the small-magnitude symptoms resulting from gradual changes in an engineering system like wind turbines. Our idea is inspired by the classical cumulative sum method, or CUSUM, but we have to redesign the accumulation mechanism for tackling unique challenges in wind turbine data. The new accumulation method is applied to two real wind turbine datasets, one with gearbox failures and the other with generator failures, and demonstrates superior performance as compared with CUSUM.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Wind Turbine Drivetrain Reliability [Slides]

Pitch bearings, main bearings, and gearboxes in conventional wind turbine drivetrains often do not meet their 20-year minimum specified lifetime, resulting in turbine downtime as well as expensive, time-consuming repairs or replacements. The dominant failure modes of the drivetrain components and the conditions that lead to their failure are not fully accounted for during product design or routinely modeled for life management. Drivetrain reliability improvements and O&M cost reductions remain top priorities for both land-based and offshore wind turbines, especially as wind turbines continue to be deployed in increasingly remote and offshore locations, continue to increase in size, and are becoming expected to be in service beyond their original design life, all of which correspond to an increase in the impact of any reliability issues on O&M costs. This presentation summarizes the most recent activities by NREL and ANL on drivetrain reliability.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Advanced Airfoil Cooling Schemes to Increase Efficiency in Gas Turbines for Combined Heat and Power Applications

This report describes a three-year interdisciplinary effort funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy/Advanced Manufacturing Office (EERE/AMO) to promote market penetration of combined heat and power (CHP) technologies. Prior studies have shown the technical potential for CHP in the United States is much larger than the current deployment of CHP systems. A large portion of the technical potential CHP market aligns with small (<20 MWe) gas turbines. CHP systems are an attractive alternative to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For example, CHP systems can reduce GHG emissions by 30–40% relative to a conventional boiler and power configuration. These GHG emission reductions are “avoided emissions” which means no CO 2 separation or sequestration is required. This report describes an effort to use additive manufacturing (AM) technologies and advanced airfoil cooling designs to increase the turbine inlet temperature by 100 °C for small gas turbines typically used in CHP systems. At the beginning of this effort, baseline performance data for small gas turbines was not available, and the potential benefits of cooling system improvements were not quantified in the available literature.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2024

Using Additive Manufacturing to Repair Gas Turbine Hot Section Components

Ni-based superalloys are used in the hot sections of gas turbine engines due to their excellent high temperature performance. During service the material degrades due to exposure at high temperature and mechanical loads. Hence, utility provides often inspect, service, and repair components in gas turbine engines to ensure safe operation. A major challenge, however, is that the most heat-resistant alloys are generally considered ‘non-weldable’ rendering them difficult to repair via welding operations. In these cases components are often scrapped and then replaced by parts which must be re-manufactured. This burdens utilities with additional cost and supply chain issues can result in long term outages or reduced operating limits. In this work EPRI and ORNL investigated a proposed repair strategy for gas turbine hot section components. Hot section superalloy GTD-111 was selected as a candidate repair material system and AM material ABD-900 the repair material. Sandwich structures were fabricated via electron beam melting additive manufacturing (EBM-AM) producing tensile bars with gage sections consisting of dissimilar ABD-900 / GTD-111 / ABD-900 material. Metallography revealed that the interface exhibited no deleterious phases or processing defeats. Creep rupture experiments on heat treated material demonstrates that the emulated repair coupons exhibit creep resistance between GTD-111 and ABD-900. This study demonstrates that the proposed EBM-AM repair strategy presents a viable opportunity towards enabling AM repair of gas turbine engine components.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2024

Uncertainty Quantification of Fatigue Behavior of Rough AM Surfaces and Microstructures to Enable Hydrogen Gas Turbine Combustion

Modification of fossil-fueled industrial gas turbines to accept no/low carbon fuels (Hydrogen, H2/natural gas blends) is a significant undertaking. Successful deployment of this technology sits at the intersection of three design criteria (1) new functional fuel injectors that can burn these fuels, (2) manufacturability to meet cost and time-to-market targets, and (3) durability in the harsh environment of an operating turbine. Additive manufacturing (AM) provides accelerated product development. However, uncertainty remains around the durability of parts with rough AM surfaces. A fully experimental approach towards quantifying fatigue performance of rough AM microstructures is costly and laborious. Instead, Solar Turbines Incorporated (Solar) proposes the use of a crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) model to quantify the factors that drive AM surface fatigue behavior. Solar will use the CPFE results, along with targeted experimental data, to train a computationally efficient surrogate model that can be incorporated into existing turbine part lifing methods.

08 HYDROGEN↗

DOE OSTI2026

2026 Innovating the Gas Turbine Supply Chain Workshop

The 2026 Innovating the Gas Turbine Supply Chain Workshop was convened at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 31–April 1, 2026. Organized by ORNL, NETL, and the Gas Turbine Association (GTA) including gas turbine original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) GE Vernova, MHI, Siemens Energy, and Solar Turbines. The workshop brought together approximately 70 participants representing OEMs, supply chain companies, national laboratories, universities, and federal government agencies. Edgar Lara-Curzio (ORNL) served as Workshop Chair.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2023

Wind Turbine / Reviewed Data

The SUMR-D CART2 turbine data are recorded by the CART2 wind turbine's supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system for the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) SUMR-D project located at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Flatirons Campus. For the project, the CART2 wind turbine was outfitted with a highly flexible rotor specifically designed and constructed for the project. More details about the project can be found here: https://sumrwind.com/. The data include power, loads, and meteorological information from the turbine during startup, operation, and shutdown, and when it was parked and idle.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Wind Turbine Gearbox Failure Detection Through Cumulative Sum of Multivariate Time Series Data

The wind energy industry is continuously improving their operational and maintenance practice for reducing the levelized costs of energy. Anticipating failures in wind turbines enables early warnings and timely intervention, so that the costly corrective maintenance can be prevented to the largest extent possible. It also avoids production loss owing to prolonged unavailability. One critical element allowing early warning is the ability to accumulate small-magnitude symptoms resulting from the gradual degradation of wind turbine systems. Inspired by the cumulative sum control chart method, this study reports the development of a wind turbine failure detection method with such early warning capability. Specifically, the following key questions are addressed: what fault signals to accumulate, how long to accumulate, what offset to use, and how to set the alarm-triggering control limit. We apply the proposed approach to 2 years’ worth of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition data recorded from five wind turbines. We focus our analysis on gearbox failure detection, in which the proposed approach demonstrates its ability to anticipate failure events with a good lead time.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Local correlation-based transition models for high-Reynolds-number wind-turbine airfoils

Abstract. Modern wind-turbine airfoil design requires robust performance predictions for varying thicknesses, shapes, and appropriate Reynolds numbers. The airfoils of current large offshore wind turbines operate with chord-based Reynolds numbers in the range of 3–15 million. Turbulence transition in the airfoil boundary layer is known to play an important role in the aerodynamics of these airfoils near the design operating point. While the lack of prediction of lift stall through Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is well known, airfoil design using CFD requires the accurate prediction of the glide ratio (L/D) in the linear portion of the lift polar. The prediction of the drag bucket and the glide ratio is greatly affected by the choice of the transition model in RANS CFD of airfoils. We present the performance of two existing local correlation-based transition models – one-equation model (γ− SA) and two-equation model (γ-Reθt‾- SA) coupled with the Spalart–Allmaras (SA) RANS turbulence model – for offshore wind-turbine airfoils operating at a high Reynolds number. We compare the predictions of the two transition models with available experimental and CFD data in the literature in the Reynolds number range of 3–15 million including the AVATAR project measurements of the DU00-W-212 airfoil. Both transition models predict a larger L/D compared to fully turbulent results at all Reynolds numbers. The two models exhibit similar behavior at Reynolds numbers around 3 million. However, at higher Reynolds numbers, the one-equation model fails to predict the natural transition behavior due to early transition onset. The two-equation transition model predicts the aerodynamic coefficients for airfoils of various thickness at higher Reynolds numbers up to 15 million more accurately compared to the one-equation model. As a result, the two-equation model predictions are more comparable to the predictions from eN transition model. However, a limitation of this model is observed at very high Reynolds numbers of around 12–15 million where the predictions are very sensitive to the inflow turbulent intensity. The combination of the two-equation transition model coupled with the Spalart–Allmaras (SA) RANS turbulence model is a good method for performance prediction of modern wind-turbine airfoils using CFD.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

NASA NTRS1971

An evaluation of a hubless inducer and a full flow hydraulic turbine driven inducer boost pump

The purpose of the study was to compare the performance of several configurations of hubless inducers with a hydrodynamically similar conventional inducer and to demonstrate the performance of a full flow hydraulic turbine driven inducer boost pump using these inducers. A boost pump of this type consists of an inducer connected to a hydraulic turbine with a high speed rotor located in between. All the flow passes through the inducer, rotor, and hydraulic turbine, then into the main pump. The rotor, which is attached to the main pump shaft, provides the input power to drive the hydraulic turbine which, in turn, drives the inducer. The inducer, rotating at a lower speed, develops the necessary head to prevent rotor cavitation. The rotor speed is consistent with present main engine liquid hydrogen pump designs and the overall boost pump head rise is sufficient to provide adequate main pump suction head. This system would have the potential for operating at lower liquid hydrogen tank pressures.

Lindley, B. K.↗