Finite Element Analysis has long helped design traditional power plants. Now, it’s proving a boon for designing “green” facilities, like wind turbines and wave power.
Pelamis Wave Energy Converter during sea trials.
Power generating equipment must be designed for both immediate cost-efficiency and a long lifespan. Realistic simulation with (FEA) is a critical tool that solves a range of engineering challenges.
涡轮叶片的理想配置是什么？哪些新合金将在天然气/蒸汽联合循环厂工作？如何以安全可靠的方式存放核燃料？如何将陆地风力涡轮机设计调整到深水安装？可以有效地从波力产生电力吗？FEA可以帮助指导设计过程并为这些问题提供答案。
To find answers, start with a CAD model — perhaps of an airfoil, a nuclear plant piping component, or the blade of a wind turbine — and then use FEA software to transform that model into a 3D mesh of geometric units. Linked together by nodes that quantify their interrelationship, the elements (which can number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions) are further constrained by boundary conditions, material characteristics, and other inputs dictated by type of product or structure modeled.
Once an FEA model is set up, any number of static, dynamic, linear or nonlinear events, including contact, collisions, buckling and collapse scenarios, and even multiphysics analyses (thermal-structural, fluid structure interaction and computational fluid dynamics), can be analyzed. Feedback from the FEA analysis (‘virtual testing’) is then used to evaluate and modify the CAD design, repeatedly if necessary, until the desired function and durability are reached.
风电：当政府和私营部门的支持增长时，风电产业最近正在经历繁荣的东西。较高的结构旨在利用更高的海拔风速，并且在海上风电场的情况下也可以抵消更高的安装成本。
Design and simulation of wind turbine towers and foundations is second nature for FEA software vendors with experience in the oil and gas offshore industry. All of the necessary material models are available for simulating foundations, such as concrete, the behavior of soils, and soil/structural interactions. Linear dynamics capture vibration (earthquake) effects, while static and dynamic nonlinear analyses simulate complex fluid-structure interactions or failure mechanisms.
Rotor blades are possibly the most visible and critical part of a wind turbine. Composites are a leading blade material; FEA modeling techniques for composites, initially driven by aerospace, are highly applicable when exploring such new materials for strength and durability in challenging weather. The software supports composite preprocessing steps such as definition of layups, distribution of orientations and thickness, and visualization of various plies. For modeling purposes, a wide range of element types (solid shells, continuum shells, and so forth) can be used together with different material and failure models, such as the Virtual Crack Closure Technique (VCCT), which was developed by Boeing and refined by Simulia.
Belamis波动工程师使用ABAQUS有限元分析来评估其发电机器的结构完整性和非线性行为。
Another critical part of a wind turbine is the bearings; several bearings manufacturers use FEA to model and simulate the contact behavior of bearing parts. The software solution takes advantage of built-in stabilization features and advanced contact algorithms. Process automation and optimization tools can be applied to FEA analysis of bearings and other aspects of wind power development to identify optimum design parameters for the most efficient and cost-effective design.
其他绿色电源：最近使用FEA的一种新颖应用是Pelamis波功率的波能量转换器，它漂浮在海面上并从波的电力产生电力。液压压力柱抵抗波浪和泵液体流体通过电力产生的发电机的运动;多个单元的波浪农场可以为成千上万的房屋提供电力。Pelamis正在使用FEA应用研究其产品的疲劳和耐用性，以分析小型部件和较大组件的性能来模拟和做出适当的修改。
其他替代能源（包括太阳能和燃料电池）在越来越多的经济和环境意义上变得可行。传统和更新能源的成本效益开发需要最先进的仿真，例如非线性FEA，设计优化和模拟生命周期管理。这些技术工具评估了各种电力发电设备的真实行为，并导致快速准确的基于性能的设计决策。
Traditional Power – turbomachinery: All turbomachines work on essentially the same set of physics and all can benefit from FEA simulation. One common FEA application is turbine blade design, particularly of the last stage blades that are long and thin and carry a huge mechanical load. The strength of materials from which the blades are manufactured is critical: the high temperatures and low pressures at which a gas turbine functions–or, by contrast, the lower temperatures and widely fluctuating pressures along a single steam turbine rotor– will affect the behavior of parts and materials in different ways all along the 30 or 40 stages in a power plant. Extensive FEA materials libraries allow modeling to predict the response of different materials–whether titanium, advanced alloys, ceramics or composites–under such huge temperature and pressure differentials.
Blade tuning to avoid flutter is another design issue where FEA, often in combination with computational fluid dynamics (CFD), can be extremely powerful. The analysis of the interaction between vortex shedding from the blade and its mechanical vibration is a very nonlinear, transient engineering problem: if the vortex shedding excites a mode in the blade it can shatter catastrophically. Modal analysis with FEA can spot the problem in advance.
Other important FEA applications in turbomachinery include examining the attachment of blades to the disk and predicting the performance of the casings that contain the blading. Competing tradeoffs between weight, performance and size must be balanced, and FEA can help avoid over-design as well as under-design. The comprehensive procedure library in an FEA code enables the engineer to evaluate dynamics, cyclic symmetry, creep, contact, natural frequency extraction of a spinning engine and more.
Nuclear Power: FEA has been employed by the nuclear industry for decades because it provides sophisticated calculation techniques compatible with the demanding quality standards required for nuclear power-plant construction. Simulia in particular has developed many of its cross-industry Abaqus capabilities from work originating in this field.
一台30兆瓦的“波浪农场”的Pelamis波能源转换器将占据一公里的海洋表面，并为20,000所房屋生产电力。礼貌的Pelamis波浪力量。
对于核植物设备，如电抗器，管道和混凝土保护屏障，FEA提供了各种工具：
• Material models for plasticity, creep, and the behavior of concrete.
• Fracture and failure analysis techniques.
• Special pipe (elbow) elements for simulating all operating aspects of the plant. For example, piping in nuclear plants can be simulated (pipe elbows are a specific type of finite element) and evaluated for heat transfer, thermal stress and pipe-whip.
在核燃金储存的全关键竞技场中，非线性FEA可用于降低燃料储存容器的掉落测试，以对储存机制进行热应力分析，或评估火灾对放射性废物储存容器的影响材料。其他应用包括地下储存的热水机械安全评估，考虑到土壤饱和度并长时间压实。后一种例子采用相似的能力 - 例如土壤模型和耦合孔隙流体扩散和应力分析 - 作为地质力学和石油和天然气工业中使用的能力分析。
The nuclear industry is facing two major challenges going forward: the development and installation of next-generation nuclear reactor technologies, which will certainly benefit from extensive analysis with FEA, and service assessments of existing older plants for which FEA can be used either for recertification or for safe decommissioning.
Dassaultsystèmessimulia.
www.simulia.com
Filed Under:FEA software,Green engineering,模拟,软件
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