Thermal Performance of Wind Turbine Power System's Engine Room

Abstract

Greatly expanded use of wind energy has been proposed to reduce dependence on fossil and nuclear fuels for electricity generation. For wind turbine power generation, as a mature technology in the field of wind power utilization, its large-scale deployment is limited by the cooling technology. Therefore, the temperature distribution of the wind turbine power generation is a key issue for the design of the cooling system. It is because the characteristics of cooling system have a great effect on the performance of the wind turbine power generation. Based on some assumptions and simplifications, a thermal model is developed to describe the heat transfer behavior of wind turbine power system. The numerical calculation method is adopted to solve the governing equation. The heat generation and heat flux are investigated with a given operating boundary. The achieved results can be used to verify whether the cooling system meets the design requirements. Meanwhile, they also can reveal that among the influencing factors, the meteorological conditions, generated output and operation state as well seriously influence its thermal performance. Numerical calculation of the cooling system enables better understanding and results in performance improvement of the system.

Wind turbine nacelle cooling systems: A review

“…Also, during winter, the nacelle ought to be very much protected and the air ought to be circulated all around to get almost even temperature spread inside the nacelle. Liu et al (2012) investigated numerically the thermal performance of a 3 MW wind mill nacelle. The wind mill cooling system was examined for thermal behavior by building a thermal prototype on the basis of certain generalization and assumptions and the impacts of various physical and geometrical parameters, climatological situations, and working condition was investigated.…”