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Design Improvement and Manufacturing of Nacelle Cover for Wind Turbine

Dong Won Jung
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jeju National University, Jeju, Republic of Korea

Abstract—Recognition of the value of wind energy as a low cost, clean source for electricity is creating new business opportunities for manufacturing and materials innovation. Worldwide growth in wind generation since 1994 has been 30% or higher annually. The cost of energy from large wind power plants has declined to less than $0.05/kWh at good wind sites. In these wind turbine nacelles play major role which is located at the top portion and it is the heart part of wind turbine. Major components such as rotors and generators is inside the Nacelle covers which turn the wind energy into rotational power and generate electrical energy. The nacelle cover acts as a protective case and a technical compartment containing these important parts. Nacelle covers that protecting these critical parts of wind turbines should be as light as possible, ensuring stability for strength and buckling despite strong winds, sufficiently supported from wind loads, snow loads and self-weights. Nacelle covers of wind turbines are often manufacture from steel sheets such as galvanized steel sheets to withstand wind and snow loads. However, while the steel plate's nacelle cover is stable for the applied load, the weight is heavy and requires a lot of economic consumption, such as cost of installation, transportation cost, and increased tower thickness. Recently, many wind turbines have a tendency to use a composite material of a nacelle cover, and the composite nacelle cover has a similar strength as steel plate and is lighter than steel plate, making it economical to consider the production cost of wind turbines. This paper we are study about nacelle cover design process, FEM simulation to determine shape of wind turbine and finally manufacturing it for future use. This study finds out that when wind passes through the nacelle cover because of modified shape there are differences to influence of wind. 

Index Terms—wind turbine, nacelle cover, computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

Cite: Dong Won Jung, "Design Improvement and Manufacturing of Nacelle Cover for Wind Turbine" International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 177-183, February 2020. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.9.2.177-183

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.