Browsing by Subject "Wind Turbine"
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Item A reverse osmosis treatment process for produced water: optimization, process control, and renewable energy application(2009-06-02) Mareth, BrettFresh water resources in many of the world's oil producing regions, such as western Texas, are scarce, while produced water from oil wells is plentiful, though unfit for most applications due to high salinity and other contamination. Disposing of this water is a great expense to oil producers. This research seeks to advance a technology developed to treat produced water by reverse osmosis and other means to render it suitable for agricultural or industrial use, while simultaneously reducing disposal costs. Pilot testing of the process thus far has demonstrated the technology's capability to produce good-quality water, but process optimization and control were yet to be fully addressed and are focuses of this work. Also, the use of renewable resources (wind and solar) are analyzed as potential power sources for the process, and an overview of reverse osmosis membrane fouling is presented. A computer model of the process was created using a dynamic simulator, Aspen Dynamics, to determine energy consumption of various process design alternatives, and to test control strategies. By preserving the mechanical energy of the concentrate stream of the reverse osmosis membrane, process energy requirements can be reduced several fold from that of the current configuration. Process control schemes utilizing basic feedback control methods with proportional-integral (PI) controllers are proposed, with the feasibility of the strategy for the most complex process design verified by successful dynamic simulation. A macro-driven spreadsheet was created to allow for quick and easy cost comparisons of renewable energy sources in a variety of locations. Using this tool, wind and solar costs were compared for cities in regions throughout Texas. The renewable energy resource showing the greatest potential was wind power, with the analysis showing that in windy regions such as the Texas Panhandle, wind-generated power costs are approximately equal to those generated with diesel fuel.Item Reduced Order Structural Modeling of Wind Turbine Blades(2011-10-21) Jonnalagadda, YellavenkatasunilConventional three dimensional structural analysis methods prove to be expensive for the preliminary design of wind turbine blades. However, wind turbine blades are large slender members with complex cross sections. They can be accurately modeled using beam models. The accuracy in the predictions of the structural behavior using beam models depends on the accuracy in the prediction of their effective section properties. Several techniques were proposed in the literature for predicting the effective section properties. Most of these existing techniques have limitations because of the assumptions made in their approaches. Two generalized beam theories, Generalized Timoshenko and Generalized Euler-Bernoulli, for the static analysis based on the principles of the simple 1D-theories are developed here. Homogenization based on the strain energy equivalence principle is employed to predict the effective properties for these generalized beam theories. Two efficient methods, Quasi-3D and Unit Cell, are developed which can accurately predict the 3D deformations in beams under the six fundamental deformation modes: extension, two shears, torsion and two flexures. These methods help in predicting the effective properties using the homogenization technique. Also they can recover the detailed 3D deformations from the predictions of 1D beam analysis. The developed tools can analyze two types of slender members 1) slender members with invariant geometric features along the length and 2) slender members with periodically varying geometric features along the length. Several configurations were analyzed for the effective section properties and the predictions were validated using the expensive 3D analysis, strength of materials and Variational Asymptotic Beam Section Analysis (VABS). The predictions from the new tools showed excellent agreement with full 3D analysis. The predictions from the strength of materials showed disagreement in shear and torsional properties. Explanations for the same are provided recalling the assumptions made in the strength of materials approach.