The importance of these facilities is that they are designed specifically for small wind turbine blades, since they cannot be applied at the same scale as used for conventional wind turbine blades.
The CEDER-CIEMAT test bench for small wind turbine blades is located at the state-run centre’s facility in Lubia (Soria) and is the only laboratory specifically adapted for wind turbines of "up to 100 kW", capable of characterising blades to optimize manufacturers’ designs and validating them under current regulations.
The blades are the most important parts of a wind turbine as they are responsible for capturing wind energy and turning it into rotary motion. As they are high-tech components, they are also critical in terms of cost, design, manufacturing and reliability, and therefore require significant testing. Test benches are used to reproduce, on one hand, the most severe loads a blade may experience over its useful life and, secondly, simulate the accelerated accumulation of damage or wear and tear on the materials used in the blade. In parallel, additional tests are performed to provide other complementary information.
Worldwide, the number of blades testing facilities are scarce and often have a high workload due to the high number of hours (usually several months) required to analyse a single blade model. Therefore CEDER is now the only centre in Spain able to conduct these endurance tests on the blades of small wind turbines.
Further R&D in Spain
Elsewhere in Spain, this month saw Manuel Blanco, Director of the Solar Thermal Energy Department of the National Renewable Energy Centre (CENER) participating in an external taskforce in charge of evaluating the US’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) solar thermal power research programme. The meeting took place in the city of Golden, in the state of Colorado.
The taskforce was invited by the NREL to evaluate its solar thermal power research programme comprised Manuel Blanco and another five people of recognised prestige in the international field of solar thermal technologies for the production of electricity. Three of them came from the business sector and two from academia. Manuel Blanco together with an expert from Israel were the only two non-American technicians in the group.
This is not the first time that Manuel Blanco has been invited by a North American organisation to participate in an external evaluation committee. In 2009, he was invited by the Energy Department of the United States government to conduct a relatively similar study.
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