Design study for a multicomponent transducer for wind turbine test benches

Abstract

This paper covers the design study of a multicomponent transducer (MCT) for wind turbine test benches. The MCT will cover the characteristics of wind turbines in the power range of up to 6 MW. The motivation to develop a MCT such as this is to provide satisfying measurement accuracy of loads and moments for all 6 degrees of freedom in order to reduce the uncertainty in the traceability of the drive train behavior due to the applied loads. Therefore, the estimation of the measurement uncertainty is significant with respect to evaluating the design of the MCT. First, the design process of the MCT is briefly introduced. Second, the strain-gauge-based transducer design is investigated under operational conditions (e.g., torque and multiaxial loads) using finite element (FE) simulations to determine the crosstalk effects. Finally, the measurement uncertainties of all quantities are estimated based on these FE simulations according to the type B evaluation of the “Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement” (GUM; JCGM, 2010), including metrological aspects (e.g., linearity deviation and hysteresis) and the crosstalk. It can be shown that the MCT has great potential to significantly improve the measurement uncertainty for the applied wind loads on a wind turbine test bench.