Design and Fabrication of Tunable Oscillating and Rotational Kinematic Damper

Wind is rapidly becoming a more prevalent source of energy around the world. Simultaneously, wind turbines are being designed to be larger and more efficient in order to increase their output. As the blades on the turbines get longer, unwanted vibrations can cause extremely high stresses The purpose

Project Title

Design and Fabrication of Tunable Oscillating and Rotational Kinematic Damper

Project Area of Specialization

Mechanical Engineering

Project Summary

Wind is rapidly becoming a more prevalent source of energy around the world. Simultaneously, wind turbines are being designed to be larger and more efficient in order to increase their output. As the blades on the turbines get longer, unwanted vibrations can cause extremely high stresses The purpose of this project is to successfully design and fabricate the tunable damper which would provide significant damping to turbine blades. It matches the natural frequency of the structure they are attached to but move out of the phase to damp the amplitude of the vibrations. The system has more design parameters that can be varied for optimum damping such as linear mass, rotational inertia of the flywheel and radius of the pinion are all separate parameters that can be changed to tune the systems inertia.

Project Objectives

• Tunable characteristics which will make the damper work in ranging natural frequencies of wind turbine blade.
• Increase the fatigue life of Wind Turbine Blades
• Mitigate edgewise/flapwise vibrations to a large extent
• Successfully test the damper for the first 2 natural frequencies of the damper.

Project Implementation Method

• The implementation method involves first desiging the mathematical idealized model of the tunable damper.
• The inertial and dimensional values for the different components such as carraige mass, flywheel radius and rack and pinion gear ratios etc was obtained using Numerical Analysis in Matlab.
• The next step is to fabricate the Tunable damper based on the values obtained from the analysis in the software.
• The final step involves the testing of the damper whose goal is to evaluate the logarithmic decreement  of the beam aluminium (scaled model for blade).

• A higher value of logarithmic decrement corresponds to a larger amount of damping within the system.

• An aluminum beam will be used as a scaled model for wind turbine blade which will be fixed from one side and then the damper will be placed on one end of the beam.

• An excitor containing stepper motor will be attached right below the damper under the beam which will provide harmonic excitation.

• The excitation will be applied with in the range of ± 25% of the first natural frequency of the beam incremented by 0.2 radian per second. The excitation force should create ± 20% deflection of the length of the beam.

• With the help of Arduino coupled with accelerometers, the data will be acquisited and logarithmic decrement will be calculated.

Benefits of the Project

Advantages Over Simple TMD

• The system has more design parameters that can be tuned for optimum damping dynamics when compared to a normal TMD.
• The linear mass, rotational inertia of the flywheel, and the radius of the pinion are all separate parameters that can be changed to tune the system’s inertia.
• The rotational motion allows the device to incorporate a rotary damper (dashpot) to provide the damping coefficient, ????2.
• Compared to a linear damper, a rotary damper will not constrain the travel distance of the smaller mass.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The final deliverable will include the damper fitted on one edge of the Aluminium cantilever beam which will be acting as a scaled model for wind turbine blade. Beneath the beam, there will be an excitor will provide the harmonic oscillation to the beam. The blade will be fixed from one side on a rigid support and one end will be free to oscillate. Using accelerometers embedded with Aurdino, the accleration plots will be obtained and from that, logarithmic decreement will be calculated.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Core Industry

Manufacturing

Other Industries

Energy , Others

Core Technology

Others

Other Technologies

Shared Economy

Sustainable Development Goals

Affordable and Clean Energy, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Responsible Consumption and Production

Required Resources

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