Wind Energy Equipment Testing

Some friends were discussing the recent visit of Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chiu to Clemson University to deliver a check for $45 million to start a test facility for horizontal wind turbine gearboxes.  It seems that there have been a number of gearbox failures in recent years that suggest a wider problem that will need to be solved in order for wind energy to become as reliable and cost effective as promised.  Gear boxes are failing in the range of 10 years of operation, and occasionally, sooner than that.

This is not difficult to understand.  The forces acting on the gearbox are huge.  On the input side you have 3 blade propeller with blades that are now approaching 200 feet in length.  I don’t care how light weight they are, carbon fiber epoxy or Kevlar or whatever, the forces are tremendous.  In addition the blades have to rotate to take them out of the wind when the wind is too fast for the system to operate.  So there are actuators at the base of the blades adding to the weight and mechanical complexity.

Then there is the intermittency of the wind itself.  This can manifest itself as bursts of wind or winds of different speeds hitting the same rotor.  Which can lead to all kinds of impulse loads on the gearbox.  Gear teeth becoming momentarily unloaded and loaded in response to the wind.  This is actually one of my favorite “Stump the Band” questions for mechanical engineers; what is the formula for the shock load of gear tooth reversal?  It’s big, whatever it is.  And the shock load of the propellers is driving the gearbox against a high inertia load, the generator.  So there is a lot of resistance to overcome.

But the really scary part is that the gear systems are often in the range of 30,000 pounds in weight.  And they are mounted on metal masts at heights of 1.5 times the blade length.  So that would be 300 feet up in the air in the case of a system with a 200 foot blade.  Making the replacement of a failed gearbox a bit more complex than dropping the transmission out of a car, for example.  Especially since most wind farms are in very remote locations where the land is cheap and the wind blows some of the time.

This lead the Department of Energy to put out requests for proposals to address the technical question of providing the industry with a resource to help in the design of gearbox systems with much higher reliability than the current designs.  Total cost of this effort, approximately $100 million dollars.  The proposed test facility is targeting 20 megawatt power handling capability, or approximatley 27,000 horsepower depending on the exact rpm of the system.  This is an incredibly big piece of machinery.

Clearly, gearbox technology has to get better for the wind industry to continue to prosper.   I wonder if we are putting a band aid on a technology that is fundamentally flawed.  Maybe we need to be concentrating on the next generation of the technology and improving the cost performance by an order of magnitude.  Surely we can do better.

B&R Industrial Automation Launches Packaging Expert Group for North America

In 2010 B&R Industrial Automation has formed a new team of packaging experts to work closely with the packaging industry community. John Kowal, Tom Jensen, Joe Krogman and Marcel Voigt joined B&R in January as part of the strategic market development group. This team of automation experts will expand B&R’s activities in the North American marketplace and strengthen the company’s position within the packaging industry.

John Kowal and Tom Jensen are respected, well-known members of the packaging automation community. Over the years they have contributed greatly to the establishment of industry wide standards, the expansion of mechatronics education, and the adoption of advanced control technologies and competitive strategies for packaging system providers and users. They will lead B&R’s Packaging Group as Market Development Managers.

Tom Jensen brings with him more than 20 years of experience in machine development, motion control, and robotics. He is a longtime member of the OMAC Packaging Workgroup, PMMI Education Committee and Institute of Packaging Professionals. Jensen’s expertise lies in engineering management and business development within the realm of packaging automation.

Over the past 17 years John Kowal has successfully established technology companies and standards in vertical markets worldwide. His main career focus has been in the packaging industry. Kowal helped form the OMAC Packaging Workgroup. He is an active member of the PMMI Trade Show Strategy Committee, IoPP, ISA and BMA, and also hosts a popular Packaging Machinery LinkedIn Group.

Joe Krogman, Project Manager, and Marcel Voigt, Application Expert, are the technology experts within the packaging group. Krogman has more than 8 years experience in sales and engineering. Voigt has been working in the field of motion control for the past 6 years. Their extensive knowledge in packaging machine development will contribute greatly to the success of the B&R Packaging Expert Group.

B&R Automation
www.br-automation.com

::Design World::

Magnetics 2010 and Motion, Drive & Automation

There is a small industry conference that takes place every year with a lineup of industry experts that is top notch by any standard.  It’s called the Motion, Drive and Automation Conference put on by E-Drive magazine.  This year it is located at the Disney Hilton Resort in Orlando and is taking place on January 28 & 29.   The conference includes a wide range of industry experts from many fields of advanced electric motor design, advanced motor control concepts, power semiconductors and state of the art motor testing system.  There will be a lot of technical and product presentations that showcase leading edge technology in electric motors, precision gear reducers, new technology for motion sensing, and a number of improved power semiconductor devices for the motor control industry.  This is a great place to get up to date on the latest technology that will impact of motor and control technology across many industries over the next few years.

In addition, the Magnetics 2010 Conference will be running concurrently at the same venue.  Magnets are a strategic material without which many motors would simply not operate.  In the ever-changing motor industry, there is always a new design that seeks to make an enhancement over previous solutions, or introduce a new solution to old problems.  Declining prices for Neodymium Iron Boron magnets over the last few years have created a number of novel design shifts which have been instrumental in bringing more varieties of permanent magnet machines into the forefront of motion control and mechatronic technology.  To the point where over the last two years a resurgance of permanent magnet rotor designs have been created to improve the energy denisty and lower the cost of specialty motors in washing machines and air conditioning compressors.

This last development, combined with the forecast increase of hybrid electric car sales coming this year, are expected to increase the sale of permanent magnets by 10-15 percent by 2011.  That’s a staggering jump in a market that is almost exclusively supplied by China.  And there is no assurance that China can meet the forecast production.

The US Department of Commerce usually has a say in the sale of products or businesses to foreign countries that are deemed to be strategic or sensitive technology.  In fact, I got stuck in a situation where my employer was told specifically that we could not sell a CNC controller to a Korean customer.  That’s pretty small potatoes compared to controlling the supply of permanent magnets which influences billions of dollars worth of electric motors manufactured and sold all over the world.  So it strikes me as a little odd that the sale of Magnequench to its current owners, Neo Materials, was completed without a much discussion. leaving the US without a domestic magnet supplier.

There will surely be a lot of discussion about this situation at the conference, and I will be in attendance to get the latest information on the subject.  So look forward to a review of the conference in an upcoming post.

Inventing Industry in the (near) Future

The future of the US economy, and our future as an industrial power will be the result of our cumulative creativity.  New industries will be the result of new ideas, new technologies, new thinking.  It’s gratifying to see programs like the First Robotic Competition getting 215,000 junior high school and high school students exposed to and involved in robotics.  Problem solving, finding solutions, getting their creativity flowing to make a box of parts into a working machine with real world performance.  It will be even more interesting to see what those same kids will be into 5 to 10 years from now as they begin their careers in the many technology pursuits they are likely to follow.

Technology is a major driving force in the economy.  The ability to create whole new industries that have never existed before.

And there is a second driving force, sometimes made less obvious by the flash of the latest technical breakthrough.  Cost.  What is the relationship of cost to the development of industry?  As costs decline volume goes up.  Steel manufacturing per man year of labor increased 500% during a period of intense competition between the US and Japan.  And interestingly, one of the breakthroughs was the creation of the “mini-mill” which could produce specialty steels more cost effectively by making them in smaller batches.  Sometimes the solution is counter intuitive.  The steel industry was all about increasing batch size.  But serving the market with more complex products turned out to be easier with smaller batches, ultimately increasing overall sales and defending the US market to some extent from foreign competition.

Are there other cases where innovation was economically driven?  In the machine tool world the majority of manufacturers develop bigger and more complex machines so that a single machine can handle any operation.  This complexity tends to drive costs up quickly.  So the tendency is to find high performance machine tools costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.  In contrast, the HAAS company re-invented the machine tool business by focusing on making a low cost, high quality machine tool that many shops could afford to buy.  They were one of the first companies to have several models of machine tool in the $50K range.

They did it by concentrating on the economics of a machine tool that was profitable in operation.  That means a machine with a low cost to purchase, low operating and maintenance costs, and sufficient precision to meet the requirements of most operations.   In order to reduce their machine cost they had to develop their own controls platform.  They restructured everything in the design and manufacture of the CNC system to meet the cost objective.

In act, they are so successful, that HAAS is the largest CNC company in the western world.

Many similar situations exist in other industries.  In small plastic parts manufacturing there are a number of breakthroughs that have created lower cost parts in smaller batches based on innovative new tooling systems.  In metal fabrication there are new process like thixotropic molding and metal injection molding that have been developed to lower the cost of metal goods by making parts at lower costs.  These solutions are focused on reducing costs and other barriers to the entre of new products like tooling costs and minimum batch sizes.  And they represent major new markets that were not possible in the past, because they are focused on the economics of the industry they serve.  Decreasing the cost of entry and the cost of part manufacturing opens up new markets

So inventing the future can be technology.  Or as it can be economics.   It’s all innovation.  And it’s all about delivering value.

The Road to Recovery

Economic recovery, job creation, whatever you want to call it, everyone is trying to figure out how to get employment numbers back up and get the economy back on track.  Seems that the situation is pretty severe, and we’ve managed to export it to all of our trading partners.  But there is controversy over the information being reported.  The news is in the position of impacting the tone, so they can make things sound bad, or not, depending on who’s data they use and how they phrase their comments.

Many analysts have commented that the reporting of employment data in the US has been manipulated over the last few years and, for example, there is a whole category of people who are unemployed and are not being counted because they are assumed to have quit looking for work.  (How’s that for cynicism)   And China has been accused of artificially holding it’s currency value low in order to minimize the impact of decreased exports.   Interestingly, US exports are up significantly due to the weak dollar, so there’s at least some silver lining to the clouds of an economic downturn.

But the real road to recovery is based on real value.  Technology is great, it enables a lot of new product concepts that make our lives more convenient.  But the root is in the value that is delivered.  That value can be something compelling, like the iPod, which offers the convenience of incredible portability and simplicity in delivering entertainment media, or a major improvement in the energy storage capacity of batteries which makes hybrid cars possible.  The value that a product delivers is what makes it attractive and drives a customer to own it.

This means that technology cannot be dissociated from it’s economics.  The electric car is still a challenge because a cup (about 20 cents worth) of gasoline contains enough energy to move a 2 ton car down the road to the gas station when you’ve run out.   Which is a very cost effective exchange instead of you and several of your friends pushing your SUV to the next station to fill up.  So an electric car should cost about the same to operate as a gasoline car unless there are many people who are willing and able to pay a premium to drive electric.  And it’s getting there, and there are quite people who will pay the premium.  About 300,000 a year now.

But there is no product on the market that is immune to improvement.  So the thing that will really get the economy moving, and get people working, is product development.  Any improvement that enhances the value of a product is important to the success of the US as a nation.  That means everything.

That’s why the current dialog in the alternative energy sector is so important.  Significant improvements such as direct drive generators in the wind market and lower cost tracking technology in solar offer big advantages in the overall economic performance of these technologies.  This will reduce the amount of tax dollars that have to be used to subsidize the emerging industries.  And I’m betting there are a lot more improvements to come.

So the road to recovery is improving value.  In any product, in any market.  And that’s change we can really count on.

Energy Future – Reinventing the Power Company

It seems trite to say it, but the world around us is changing quickly and in some unanticipated ways.  The venerable electric power companies invented by Thomas Edison over a hundred years ago are going through some tough times.  In a seeming contradiction, demand for electricity continues to rise, but revenues and profits are declining as more alternative energy projects are coming on line.

As a former resident of Colorado, the Public Service company provided electricity and natural gas throughout the region.  In Texas there are many power companies, Austin Energy being the company in the area where I live.  In both cases the State Legislatures run the utility companies.  So there is a strange mixture of a commercial enterprise selling a product in a broad commoditized market, with the assumed objective of making a profit.  Utility companies used to be considered very secure investments, if somewhat low return.

But being a government run enterprise, they are subject to legislative regulation, and in recent times the mandated goals and  balancing the books appears to be in conflict.  Both Colorado and Texas have passed legislation requiring that the utility companies put up wind farms and solar projects.  In spite of studies that reported the cost for alternative energy would be greater than the cost of coal fired electricity. In addition, the legislators have required that the utility company pay customers rebates to help underwrite the cost of solar installations.  And the utility companies are required to buy the excess generated electricity from the customer.  How are the utility companies supposed to survive under these conditions?

The cash squeeze got so bad that Austin Energy had to notify over 150 customers with solar projects that were already approved that they didn’t have the money to pay for them.  And further, the utility company said it projected a need to increase rates over the next few years as the cost of wind power and solar power projects that were being added to the electric power mix are coming on line.  Exactly as predicted by the industry consultants.

Utility companies are in the business of providing reliable, low cost energy.  Utility companies are not typically in the business of developing new power generation technology.  This has lead some several companies to look at their opportunity to fulfil the operation and management role across all the power technologies available.  And initial projections support the idea that this is a direction that will sustain the role of the utility.

Our standard of living and our manufacturing base depends to a certain extent on a low cost of electricity, just as transportation costs are dependent on the cost of fuel.  Maintaining good supplies of both and keeping costs low are foundational to a strong economy.

Jobs 2.0

As a former Colorado resident I was aware of the growing wind industry resources in the area.  North of Denver near an old regional airport there is a lot of land that is “underdeveloped” and some of it is being used for testing wind turbines.  Which is a pretty tricky business because of the massive scale of current wind turbines.  Propeller blades of gargantuan proportions, huge bearing systems, wind tunnel testing.  It’s impressive.

And as I recently reported in this blog site, the American Solar Energy Association, which happens to be headquartered in Boulder Colorado, did a widely quoted report which claims (among other things) that the State of Colorado increased employment by 10,000 jobs in the Green Energy sector.  It’s not coincidence that the report focused in some detail on the activity in Colorado, since, being in Boulder, there is direct access to information   Denver also has a major National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus where thousands of people are employed, many of whom work on solar , wind and many green related technologies.  So there is a lot of local activity that ASEA is aware of directly.

The State of Colorado had mandated the use of wind and solar power in the energy mix of the local power utility.  And there is a fairly significant wind farm being built in Northern Colorado.  So for several years, while the wind farm is under construction, there will be quite a few hundred workers involved in that construction project.  But like all projects, it will be completed in a couple of years and those jobs will have to move on.

But the 10,000 jobs number included government workers hired by NREL and temporary construction jobs on the wind farm. The actual private sector estimate is less than half of the 10,000.  Worse is that the private sector estimate includes guys who put insulation into your attic, and a percentage of all appliance industry workers on the basis that some fraction of that labor is focused on energy efficiency.  So this gets to be a very difficult number to pin down.

The bigger problem is putting the green jobs, however many, in proper context.  The State of Colorado is currently trying to help 120,000 unemployed people with unemployment assistance.  And Colorado is in relatively good shape compared to other parts of the country which are much harder hit.  Based on some recent editorial commentary, the national unemployment numbers may be under reported because of manipulation of the reporting basis, and that government claims about the impact of green energy on the economy are similarly exaggerated.  And that is bad news all around.

But what I find shocking in the Colorado situation is that two years ago several major Oil & Gas companies were “shovel ready” to mine and refine shale oil resources in remote parts of the state which would have had a significant impact leading to thousands of new jobs.  But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar (D), a Colorado Senator and resident, decided that permitting shale oil recovery would be inconsistent with the goals of land management.  Maybe it wasn’t “green” enough.

But right now, we could sure use the business.

Magnets aren’t US anymore

The permanent magnetic is a quiet, unobtrusive work horse in so many applications that it, like many things that are mechatronics related, is mind bogglingly (is that a word?) pervasive.  Magnets are the key material technology to enable high efficiency and power dense electric motors.  And electric motors are everywhere.

The particular magentic material that has enabled the CD, DVD, Hard Disk Drive, high performance speakers, magnetic resonance imaging and many other technical wonders, is Neodymium Iron Boron.  Based on General Motors research on magnet materials (in the 1980’s), scientists found a particular molecule of these materials which exhibited extremely high magnetic strength.  And, of course, one of the immediate benefits would be reducing the size of starter motors in cars by 30% and the weight of the motors by even more.  Great stuff!

But making the molecule wasn’t exactly a picnic.  Alloying was easy, but it turned out you had to cool the material down suddenly in order to get just the right molecule to form in a powder and then sinter and magnetize the result.  A whole new process had to be developed, called spin casting, to cool the material quickly enough to generate high quality raw material for NeFeB magnets.   I’m sure there are a lot more technical details, but I don’t remember much from my tour of the GM Magnequench facility in Indiana.  It’s been several years.

NeFeB alloy has been dramatically improved and as demand has increased, fortunately, the price has dropped from the extremely high levels during it’s introduction.  As prices have declined it is estimated that 16,571 tons of Neodymium were used in magnet making in 2009 and 24,635 tons will be used by the year 2014.  That’s an increase of 48% in five years.  That’s huge.

The reason for all the increase is the fact that NeFeB magnets make really efficient motors.  So the new generation of appliance motors and air conditioning compressort that include NeFeB magnetics to increase the flux of the rotor combined with electric and hybrid car motors are driving demand more more magnets.  And now some emerging technology in the wind power marketplace, direct drive generators, will require many tons of additional material.

But what about our friends at GM Magnequench?  They’re gone!  The great future, full of potential for a US manufacturing company, lost to the sale of the company and closing the manufacturing facility.  GM sold the company to New Materials Technology in Toronto which is owned by China.  But the new owners couldn’t run the US factory at a profit.  Even at $20/hour for labor.  All the manufacturing jobs, gone.

There is currently no NeFeB magnet manufacturing in the US.  Which is kind of crazy when you think of all the applications we have for the stuff.  Even worse is the fact that a lot of advanced military hardware is dependent upon the magnets for guidance motors on missiles and a host of other applications.  And according to one source China now owns 97% of the world’s Rare Earth Elements sources.    Which is why there are now hundreds of companies in China selling magnets.

On the positive side, this has lead to overall declining prices for these magnets.  But will that continue to be the case?  The Chinese government is expecting to decrease their exports of magnets by 34% next year.  This could spell trouble for many companies.

But there is hope. The USGS has reported that the Mountain Pass Mine in Southern California is one of the largest and richest deposits of Rare Earths, including Neodymium, in the world.  And Molycorp is ramping up to fill the gap with new mining and manufacturing capacity.  Go get ‘em guys! Free enterprise at work.

Big Wind – Big Picture

I have been slowly working my way through the DOE’s Wind Power study targeting 20% of the projected US electrical capacity to be generated by wind power by the year 2030.  It’s 248 pages long.  You can view, download or print it at your pleasure.  No, I haven’t read the whole thing.  Based on the 40 pages I have gone through so far there are a number of really interesting things to consider.

The DOE estimates that it will require 100,000 wind turbines to be installed and connected to the grid in addition to the ones we already have running to achieve the stated goal.  That’s great news for GE and Siemens who are the leaders in wind turbine manufacturing.  And what about Energy Secretary Chu’s recent comment that “more than 50% of the turbine’s content is made in America” ?   Maybe not so comforting for the American worker.

Large multinational corporations do not have any implied loyalty to the country that they are incorporated in.  In fact, the bigger the company, the more adversarial the relationship can become.  Microsoft is sure feeling it with restraint of trade problems in the US and the EU.  We have watched US tax policy drive world renowned US corporations to move their assets and factories to other countries to improve their cost structure.  Ultimately benefiting others instead of the workers here in the US that helped build their respective companies.

In this situation, particularly if some financial analysts don’t look favorably on GE’s current situation, surely the upcoming wave of spending on wind power will serve to bolster the giant corporation’s position.  After all, we are talking about machines that sell for $2-6 Million  each.  Multiply that times 1000.  And that’s only a fraction of what will be required to hit the DOE target.  But an increase of cash flow of $2-6 Billion a year for the next twenty years sounds like a “wind fall” to me.

But that’s only a fraction of what is needed.  100,000 wind turbines over the next 23 years is 4347 units a year.  And where is the money for this going to come from?  A significant portion of it will be underwritten through investment tax credits, accelerated depreciation and direct subsidy.  That means that several billion dollars a year in taxes eliminated from the US Government’s revenue.  Revenues that will have to be made up elsewhere.

And please let’s not go into the number of barrels of imported oil thing again.  Almost none of the electricity generated in this country is  powered by oil, foreign or domestic.

But when did this get approved as domestic energy policy?  I know I sure didn’t get to vote on this plan.  Did you?

And I sure don’t remember when we made the three digit slip from millions of dollars being spent by the US Government to billions of dollars being spent by the US Government. 100,000 wind turbines at $2-6 million each is $200 to 600 billion dollars over the next 23 years.

I love clean technology.  It is absolutely the way to go.  But we’ve got to be smarter shoppers with tax payer money.  Pebble bed nuclear power is way cheaper and unplugging existing wells in the US will stop the flow of funds to terrorists and make the US energy independent in 1 to 2 years while putting huge numbers of people back to work.

Maybe sustainable energy isn’t so sustainable financially.

Big Wind Machines

Recently I had occaision to discuss the merits of wind power with a colleague.  In particular there is a controversy between horizontal axis wind turbines, the giant propeller driven systems you see in advertisements, and vertical wind, which does not have much presence in the marketplace.  The premise is that horizontal systems can take advantage of the large swept area of the propeller blades to generate a great deal of force.  I’m not sure if this is supposed to imply that large swept areas intrinsically convert more kinetic energy from the wind into electricity.  And it is easy to conclude that this is the benefit of horizontal wind turbines.

Except that there is a fundamental mechatronic system at work.  The large propeller turns at low speeds, typically around 18 rpm on average, and there is a massive gearbox that is used to increase the speed of the output to turn a generator at high speed, which is typically where generators are most efficient.  The gear increaser has the effect of also increasing the amount of torque required at the input (propeller) by the gear ratio.  So if the gear increase is 100:1, then the propeller must be size 100 times larger in swept area in order to produce the needed torque to turn the generator.

This actually gets a bit worse since the mass, and it is very substantial, of the gear box itself represnts inertia that is resisting the turning of the blades.  And there is a generator rotor at the end of the gearbox whose mass (massive mass) is now resisting the turning of the propeller by the square of the ratio.  So if the ratio is 100:1, the inertia is increased by 10,000 times.  Even magnetic drag, or the residual attraction of the rotor to the stator, will get amplified in the same fashion, making it a significant force to contend with.

Add to this situaion a list of systems losses for overall fricitional loss of the bearings and gearbox, parasitic losses for steering and blade pitch adjustments.   Efficiency losses due to long distance transmission of power, that is a by-product of the remote sites that have favorable wind conditions.  It’s a pretty difficult situation to engineer.  And they keep proposing to build them bigger and bigger, hoping that the scale effect will overcome the problems.

All of the vertical wind systems I have seen so far are much smaller due to the fact that smaller rotors can turn at higher speed and power electric generators directly.  The flax axial generator is very popular in do-it-yourself designs that people are experimenting with in their back yards.

But vertical wind can also scale up.  And there are a few companies doing it.  With convertional wind power costing $2/watt, vertical systems could bring that price down very quickly and allow systems that can be installed close to the point of use or in offshore arrays where generation takes place almost 100% of the time.  Unlike the average 31% on the large land based systems.

Now that’s progress, 300% increase in energy generation at lower cost.  Hope it comes to market soon.

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