Land-based wind turbines with flexible rail-transportable blades –  Part 1: Conceptual design and aeroservoelastic performance

Bortolotti, Pietro; Johnson, Nick; Abbas, Nikhar J.; Anderson, Evan; Camarena, Ernesto; Paquette, Joshua

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-6-1277-2021

Articles | Volume 6, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-6-1277-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-6-1277-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 6, issue 5

Research article

|

23 Sep 2021

Research article |

| 23 Sep 2021

Land-based wind turbines with flexible rail-transportable blades – Part 1: Conceptual design and aeroservoelastic performance

Pietro Bortolotti, Nick Johnson, Nikhar J. Abbas, Evan Anderson, Ernesto Camarena, and Joshua Paquette

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Final revised paper (published on 23 Sep 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 01 Jun 2021)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1: 'Comment on wes-2021-29', Athanasios Barlas, 04 Jun 2021

The article presents an interesting and comprehensive study on design optimization of land-based wind turbines with flexible rail transportable blades. Despite possible modelling fidelity limitations, the work is well written and provides good scientific insight in the explored concepts. Detailed comments are provided in the attached pdf file.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2021-29-RC1
RC2: 'Comment on wes-2021-29', Didier Lemosse, 30 Jun 2021

The presented study deals with the "complete" life of a wind turbine system, from construction and transportation to energy production. That study then introduced of lot of analysis processes and a lot of dedicated tools (blade design, airfoils, optimization patterns, coupled aero-servo-elastic simulations and so on).

Introducing the transportation of the blade from the construction factory to the wind turbines farm is a real challenge and may be treated in several ways. Here the authors want to evaluate the rail way transportation situation. This is a coupled problem because the transporation mode induced design constraints on the blades and then modify the whole system behaviour.

It is an really interesting and valuable contribution for the wind turbine domain development. The paper is more presented as an application study than as a scientific analysis, but nevertheless need to mastering a lot of scientific concepts alltogether. The introduction part of the article could be modified in order to make its topic more obvious.

More details in the added document.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2021-29-RC2
AC1: 'Revised submission on wes-2021-29', Pietro Bortolotti, 04 Aug 2021

The authors would like to thank the associate editor Prof. Sandrine Aubrun and the two reviewers Athanasios Barlas and Didier Lemosse for their time and valuable feedback. Their inputs contribute to the improvement of the paper. A list of point-by-point replies to the reviewers’ comments is reported in the supplement pdf. The text from the reviewers is reported in italics and has been divided into a numbered list. Each point is followed by the authors’ reply.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2021-29-AC1

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

AR by Pietro Bortolotti on behalf of the Authors (04 Aug 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (16 Aug 2021) by Sandrine Aubrun

ED: Publish as is (19 Aug 2021) by Jakob Mann (Chief editor)

AR by Pietro Bortolotti on behalf of the Authors (19 Aug 2021)

Short summary

The length of rotor blades of land-based wind turbines is currently constrained by logistics. Turbine manufacturers currently propose segmented solutions to overcome these limits, but blade joints come with extra masses and costs. This work investigates an alternative solution, namely the design of ultra-flexible blades that can be transported on rail via controlled bending. The results show that this is a promising pathway for further increasing the size of land-based wind turbines.