Hydropower is the largest renewable energy source in the world. However, in the Columbia and Snake River basins, several species of Pacific salmon and steelhead have been listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act due to significant declines of fish population. Dam operators and design engineers are thus faced with the task of making hydroelectric facilities more fish friendly throu...

Turbo-expander is the most crucial and expensive component in Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) power generation systems. The turbine engineering, design and research development process for ORC system is costly, time-consuming, and difficult for new-entrants in the ORC field. This paper investigates the re-design and retrofit of an off-the-shelf turbocharger for use in a 1 kW ORC system. The expande...

The wind turbine foundation serves as a permanent construction in the harsh marine corrosive environment, its anticorrosion design is essential to the safe use of the wind turbine structure. At present, there is a significant controversy over the local corrosion mechanism (such as pitting corrosion, and crevice corrosion) and its diffusion mechanism in the academic circle. In the paper, the Far...

1. Abstract Conventional wind turbine blades have been designed using fatigue life predictions based on a fixed wind load distribution that does not fully capture uncertainty of the wind load. This could result in early fatigue failure of blades and eventually increase the maintenance cost of wind turbines. To produce reliable as well as economical wind turbine blades, this paper studies reliab...

One of the options being examined in last decades in the development of environmentally sustainable, energy-efficient and lightweight vehicles is the replacement of piston engines by gas turbine engines, especially in hybrid vehicles. A lot of effort has been consistently put in design and production of concept hybrid automobiles powered by gas turbine engines by leading automobile producers su...

This paper presents a new optimization algorithm to design an optimal proportional, integral, derivative (PID) controller in hydro-turbine generator governor for damping output frequency oscillations. In this research, we utilize a stochastic and optimal based PID controller to control frequency-response of the hydro turbine. The proposed algorithm is employed to design an optimal PID controlle...

The reaction turbines have application in very wide range hydro power projects. The turbines are the most important components of any hydro power plant. Its cost varies 15-35% of the total cost of hydropower project. Thus the cost effective design of the turbine is of utmost importance. It is very crucial to understand the flow behavior of the turbine under various operating conditions. The mod...

This paper presents a methodology to design an effective wind speed observer using an alternative mathematical representation of the aerodynamic torque of a variable-speed wind turbine. This alternative model is linear in parameters. Then, using this observer, a pitch fault detection scheme is conceived. Numerical experiments using the National Renewable Energy Laboratory wind turbine simulator...

This paper presents a new optimization algorithm to design an optimal proportional, integral, derivative (PID) controller in hydro-turbine generator governor for damping output frequency oscillations. In this research, we utilize a stochastic and optimal based PID controller to control frequency-response of the hydro turbine. The proposed algorithm is employed to design an optimal PID controlle...