Alternative energy and greener energy sources are a popular and growing field of research for both ecological and financial reasons. Adept Engineering has worked with alternative energy companies all over the world to create and improve their green energy concepts. Alternative energy is a highly competitive field. Harnessing and transforming energy into usable power is riddled with engineering challenges, with efficiency and reliability at the top of the priority list.
Among the many alternative energy projects Adept Engineering has developed was a hydro-turbine rotor hub. An alternative energy company was using underwater turbines to generate predictable, sustainable green energy from currents made by rivers, tides, etc. The company hired Adept Engineering to handle the design and analysis of the rotor hub and support pylon for their next prototype turbine. While similar to a wind turbine, the environment in which a kinetic hydro-power turbine functions is drastically different and presents its own design requirements.
Using computer simulations of underwater loading to the turbine blades, Adept performed Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to design the rotor hub, which allowed us to acquire real strain test data from a functional turbine. While computer simulations have come a long way, genuine data is always best. That real-world data enabled Adept to correlate the analysis and better understand the underwater environment the hydro-turbine rotor hub would experience.
The hydro-turbine rotor hub design and development involved:
- Bolted flange analysis
- Finite element analysis
- Precision component design
- Fatigue analysis
- Geometric tolerance analysis
- Germanischer Lloyd specification
- Strain gauge calibration
- Full scale deployment and testing, and much more
Adept Engineering also created a support pylon for a hydrokinetic generator and developed a megawatt scale wind turbine, among other alternative energy projects.
