Additional lifting days for single blade installation

Crane companies face difficulties when installing blades of wind turbines: the tall cranes required for installation have large sail areas and are unable to lift 80% of the time due to too high wind speeds. Also load control by men from the ground is limited in high winds. To design a new installation method, enabling more lifting days per year without sacrificing safety, wind research is executed. Height and gust correction factors as well as wind distribution functions are analyzed to compare the existing with the newly developed method. After a concept phase, a multi-criteria analysis shows that a fixed blade manipulator is the most favorable concept installation method. A manipulator connected to the tip of the crane grabs the blade around its center of gravity. By erecting the crane, the blade is lifted to the hub from a 6 o’clock direction. This manipulator needs to be designed. After a degrees of freedom analysis, the program of requirements shows that the manipulator requires 4 degrees of freedom: three rotations and one translation. Because each degree influences the next, the optimal order of degrees is derived. For each degree, the best combination of mechanism and drive system is selected. The largest surface of the blade is pointed towards the crane to optimize the crane’s strength. The functional design of the manipulator is transferred into a structural design by dimensioning the components and a 3D CAD model is created. Calculation shows that the bending moment around the crane base by wind from the side is 33% less when the manipulator is used; resulting in 43% more lifting days with equal bending moments.

Subject

wind turbine
crane
blade installation

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3e351ec2-927d-4785-bb26-ff098369a37f

Part of collection

Student theses

Document type

master thesis

Rights

Files

PDF

2015.TEL.7950_-_ML_Rodenb ... lation.pdf

17.97 MB

Close viewer