Design Study of Multi-Rotor and Multi-Generator Wind Turbine with Lattice Tower—A Mechatronic Approach

New locations for onshore technology, which have not been considered so far, must be developed to increase the total installed capacity of renewable energies, especially wind energy. For this purpose, cost-effective wind turbines, even in difficult-to-access locations, such as mountainous and high-mountainous areas, must be designed. This paper presents a novel wind turbine with a related control system that meets these requirements. The proposed turbine uses a multi-rotor configuration with five rotors arranged in a star shape configuration. Each rotor drive train combines up to 12 generators in a maintenance-friendly multi-generator concept. A suitable observer-based control for load mitigation in the full-load region is proposed for the multi-rotor and multi-generator design. Simulations are used to demonstrate the applicability and practical benefits of this concept.

Substantiation of the Parameters of a Soil Tillage Machine Ripper

Introduction. Production of safe food requires the avoidance of using chemical means to bring weeds under control in cultivating crops. Existing tillage loosening and separating machine PRSM-5 Dokuchaevskaya optimizes the physical and mechanical state of the cultivated soil layer, while the weeds are carefully removed from the soil by combing out together with the whole weed root system and laid on the surface, where they dry up under the influence of climatic factors. During the operation of the tillage machine, about 30% of the total energy consumption is spent on the rotor drive. Therefore, this machine is not working satisfactorily in firm soils. Materials and Methods. The soil was considered as an elastic-plastic medium. The generalized Hookeʼs law model and a variant of the plastic flow theory were taken into account. To simplify the calculations, there was used the experimental study information on the position in space of the soil deformation surface. The intensity of stresses of polyplastic deformations of the soil layer was determined. For the numerical solution of the problem, the Ritz method was used. Results. In connection with the indicated disadvantages, the parameters of the rotor ripper are justified taking into account the reduction in energy consumption for its drive. As a result of solving the problem by the Ritz method, the geometric shape of the rotor ripper was determined. The energy performance of the section of the tillage machine was evaluated by the torque of the rotor drive of the loosening-separating device. The rotor drive torque was determined for rippers with flat, convex, and concave profiles and for the profile substantiated during the study. Discussion and Conclusion. The profile substantiated during the study provides the best conditions for transporting the soil at the initial moment of the rotor entry into the soil and the minimum energy consumption for its drive.

Wavelet-Based Multiresolution Bispectral Analysis for Detection and Classification of Helicopter Drive-Shaft Problems

Condition monitoring and fault diagnostics in rotorcraft have significant effect on improving safety level and reducing operational and maintenance costs. In this paper, a new method is proposed for fault detection and diagnoses of AH-64D (Apache helicopter) tail rotor drive-shaft problems. The proposed method depends on decomposing signal into different frequency ranges using mother wavelet. The most informative part of the vibration signal is then determined by calculating Shannon entropy of each part. Bispectrum is calculated for this part to investigate quadratic nonlinearities in this segment. Then, search algorithm is used to extract minimum number of indicative features from the bispectrum, which are then fed to classification algorithms. In order to quantitatively evaluate the proposed method, six classification algorithms are compared against each other such as fine K-nearest neighbor (KNN), cubic KNN, quadratic discriminant analysis, linear support vector machine (SVM), Gaussian SVM, and neural network. Comparison criteria include accuracy, precision, sensitivity, F score, true alarm, recall, and error classification accuracy (ECA). The proposed method is verified using real-world vibration data collected from a dedicated AH-64D helicopter tail rotor drive train (TRDT) research test bed. The proposed algorithm proves its ability in finding minimum number of indicative features and classifying the shaft faults with superior performance.