The Civil Engineering Side

As a civil engineer, my project is rather different than what most of my fellow REU students are working on, and it actually entails two projects related to wind turbines. As a somewhat side project, I am working two days a week with a high school student who is interested in civil engineering. His first week we did an introduction to finding research material and a lesson on statics. His second week he did an investigation into wind turbine towers. Variables he looked at included power, hub height, tower composition, and cut-in and cut-out speeds. This week, his third week, he is using the information he found to determine the amount of steel used in the towers of various wind turbines. He is also using the statics lesson I gave him to practice making shear and moment diagrams. By the end of his six weeks here, we aim to have a basic height optimization for a wind turbine column completed.

As for my project, it started off slowly, but now has direction and potential! Last week I had the pleasure of touring the EOLOS wind turbine after attending the Fluid Power Expo held at the University of Minnesota. This turbine is owned by the university and has been operational for less than a year. Being a new turbine build for research, it is equipped with a variety of sensors on the foundation, column, and the blades themselves. On the foundation of the turbine there are three accelerometers, and these are the sensors I will be working with.

Before I begin working with the massive amounts of data collected on-site, I first need to ensure that I understand the data that accelerometers output. Accelerometers measures three dimensional accelerations. From these accelerations it is possible to determine displacements and orientations. In order to determine if I am calculating the displacements and orientations properly, I am going to build a basic wooden test bed. All smart phones have accelerometers in them, these are the devices which switch the screen orientation when the phone is rotated. Therefore, I can simply use the accelerometer on my cell phone and the wooden test bed to displace my cell phone to a know height and a know orientation. The data recorded and outputted by my cell phone can than be used to validate the MatLab code I will be developing before I apply the code to actual data.

The goal of this project is to determine how the foundation of the turbine is moving and how the accelerometers themselves are moving with respect to each other.