Advanced turbines and prototype wind systems dot the plateau near Golden, Colorado, where researchers stress, test and bend wind blades and turbine components, submitting the parts to extreme conditions. Pushing the turbines to their structural and mechanical limits helps engineers design better, stronger, lighter and cheaper models.

The National Wind Technology Center is well situated to put turbines to the test. High winds funnel down from the Continental Divide through Eldorado canyon, dumping out into the front range of the Rocky Mountains.

That makes this is a good research site, but the winds are too strong for a wind farm (in the winter they can blast out of the mountains at speeds greater than 100 miles per hour).

Most wind turbines for wind farms are built to run at peak performance in steady 20-25 mile per hour winds. But Jim Johnson, a senior mechanical engineer at NWTC, says there’s power in lighter breezes. “The technology has been designed in the past to work in Class 5 and 6 winds (near 20+mph), but there are 20-times more lower wind sites that exist throughout the Great Plains, so the Lab is working on trying to maximize the power capture capability of wind turbines in those lower wind speed regimes.”

There’s little that’s low, slow or light in the labs at the National Wind Technology Center. There, blades and components are put through a battery of tests where they’re checked for structural weaknesses, load capacity and power performance. In the Dynamometer Test Facility, Senior Engineer Hal Link is surrounded by massive gearboxes and a 50-ton electric bridge crane. The equipment is used to run endurance tests on turbine drivetrains – the part that sits on top of a tower. “We run accelerated life tests by increasing the torque and working things harder so that in a period of a couple of months we can get a pretty good idea of how the gearbox will work over its lifetime.”

Over at the Small Turbine Testing lab, test blades are getting stressed out in fatigue tests. Turbine components, brake systems and power electronics are subjected to a variety of extreme operating conditions. “The intent of a fatigue test is to take the fatigue damage that the blade will see in the field and compress that into a fatigue load in a lab setting,” says Senior Project Leader Scott Hughes.

Researchers are compressing a lifetime of wear and tear on wind turbines into a few weeks or months and sharing the information with industry to promote the uptake of wind-propelled energy generation.