Sandia National Laboratories has performed advanced research in renewable energy since the 1970s, and helps our nation to reduce costs, Improve resilience and reliability, and decrease the regulatory burden of renewable energy.
Our research builds on many of Sandia’s core strengths including high-fidelity modeling; materials development, analysis, and testing; advanced controls systems; high-temperature systems; cyber security; verification and validation/uncertainty quantification; and performance testing and reliability. Using these strengths, our research has made major contributions to the nation’s energy security and resilience, economic viability, and environmental sustainability. We are helping the nation tackle climate change by making the decarbonization of the power sector achievable.
Sandia has been researching wind turbine rotor systems with programs studying vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWT) and evolving to horizontal-axis wind turbine designs and has conducted research on the rotor system spanning composite materials and structural optimization to active and passive aerodynamic load control designs.
Sandia has extensive experience with analyzing floating systems using a range of numerical modeling and experimental testing methods and has built on decades of investment in high-performance computing hardware and software development to tailor computational fluid dynamics. These tools have been applied to complete case studies following international design standards codes for the wind plant application. This is further supported by an array of codes used to perform uncertainty quantification and multi-fidelity analysis tailored to the specific problem.
Accurately assessing seabed stability helps minimize risks to offshore wind infrastructure, and helps reduce financing, installation and maintenance costs throughout the structure’s lifecycle. Sandia offers streamlined guidance and tools for comprehensive coastal assessments.
Sandia has conducted research as part of the federal multi-agency Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation (WTRIM) working group to assess and mitigate the impacts of wind turbines on radar systems, has computational siting tools to assess the potential impact of a wind plant on radar systems deployed in the US. Sandia has also recently begun work with the Department of Defense to develop new lightning protection systems for offshore wind turbines that currently impact surveillance radars in the U.S.
For the past 10 years Sandia has been developing rotor sensing technologies to monitor blade loading and damage. Acceleration and strain-based force and deflection estimation methods have been developed for normal and extreme operations of modern wind turbines. Damage detection methods have been developed that can be used in wind turbine controllers to control damage growth rate. Sandia has also engaged in research projects to apply advanced non-destructive inspection technology to wind turbine blade inspection.
Sandia operates the Scaled Wind Farm Technology Facility (SWiFT) Facility for the Department of Energy, an experimental wind plant facility with three open-source wind turbines and two meteorological towers, all highly instrumented and time synchronized through a fiber-optic data acquisition system. Located on the Reese Technology Center in Lubbock, TX the terrain is flat without significant vegetation and has a single predominant wind direction from the south, enabling the study of wake impacts within a wind plant. Hub height atmospheric inflow conditions at the SWiFT Facility are commonly representative of offshore sites with turbulence intensity values less than 5% and low wind shear. High-resolution temporal and spatial wake characterization and analysis using Sandia’s
SpinnerLidar, Windar 4-beam, and Pentalum SpiDAR lidar established uncertainty quantification methods on measurements and derived quantities of interest for the baseline site instrumentation. SWiFT’s open-source and well-characterized wind turbines that can be modified to operate innovative blades, sensors and validate blade add-on performance. Our wind energy researchers have also developed a completely open-source controller for the Scaled Wind Farm Technology Facility (SWiFT) turbines, enabling the software development, testing and deployment of novel control concepts in an operating wind plant environment that is integrated with the data acquisition system. This enables any sensor at the site to serve as a control input for the turbines.