Integrated wind turbine project development and product management

In wind turbine project development, efficient collaboration is critical to ensure that wind energy products can be developed on time and on budget, while minimizing problems associated with new product introduction.

Dassault Systèmes Sustainable Wind Turbines helps you manage not only data from all disciplines, but also additional project information like costs, resources, and requirements in a single, integrated collaborative environment. All product variants and configurations for a wind turbine design can be managed in a single project, creating tremendous cost and time savings.

Our 3DEXPERIENCE® platform provides all project managers and executives with real-time information using intuitive reports and dashboards through a single access portal. This global view enables quick response to issues and ensures projects stay on track and meet performance objectives including cost and schedule.

Engineer innovative wind turbine systems

Control systems have also become instrumental in maximizing the performance and safety of wind turbines. Mechanical components remain essential in a wind turbine for the modification of blade pitch as well as for the transmission of energy through gearbox, and many other functionalities. Continuous innovation in both mechanical design and control systems enables leading companies to differentiate and maintain their competitive edge. Currently, systems models rarely interoperate with one another and don’t exist in an “aggregated” environment that allows a whole-system validation of the complete product.

Dassault Systèmes Sustainable Wind Turbines solution delivers a collaborative environment based on our 3DEXPERIENCE®Platform for all users to work together – requirement managers, system architects, mechanical engineers, systems and controls engineers. It provides a fully integrated systems modeling environment that leverages behavioral simulation for systems and mechanical product assemblies. Combining control systems with multi-physics is the next generation approach to better understanding and accurately predicting the behavior of wind turbines.

Designing for performance and reliability

The blades are critical components of the wind turbine and subjected to large variations in stress (such as wide temperature range and severe weather) while operating in different conditions throughout the year. Composite materials are ideal for producing wind turbine blades, thanks to their strength, weight, and exceptional mechanical properties.

Dassault Systèmes Sustainable Wind Turbines offers a collaborative working framework in a single collaborative 3DEXPERIENCE®Platform where all users and applications – design, analysis, and manufacturing – can work together with an integrated data model. You can manage all aspects of composite blade design in an integrated manner, ranging from preliminary design all the way to structural certification via virtual testing. By working collaboratively and interactively in a global integrated environment, designers, analysts, and manufacturing engineers can ensure a reliable and robust composite blade design.

Predict and optimize real world behavior

Wind turbines need to operate with maximum efficiency and reliability in a myriad of real world conditions. If a blade has to be replaced while the wind turbine is in operation, the result is high warranty and replacement costs. Other tough challenges include meeting stringent environmental and safety requirements.

It is critical for manufacturers to accurately predict the effects of severe wind, water, earthquake, and operational loads on wind turbines and components. This includes strength and deformation in large structures and equipment; linear and nonlinear analysis; the impact of thermal loads, vibrations, fracture, and failure; and degradation due to corrosion. How do you avoid building expensive physical prototypes to test the performance of wind turbine components?

Dassault Systèmes Sustainable Wind Turbines enables you to accurately predict complex real world behavior for optimum design. This includes vibration, nonlinear deformation and stresses, fracture and failure, wear scenarios, and multi-physics effects like fluid-structure interactions.  It can also be used to minimize blade weight by reducing the number of plies required. By performing these analyses virtually, you can significantly reduce both development time and costs.

Maximize innovative powertrain while minimizing emissions

Wind turbine developers look to manufacture and assemble components as close as possible to a wind farm operation to minimize logistics costs for transporting large wind turbine components. How do you develop such local manufacturing expertise?

Dassault Systèmes Sustainable Wind Turbines can help you leverage supply chain capabilities for wind turbine manufacturing and assembly throughout the product lifecycle and make your suppliers an integral part of product development. The solution enables aggregation and automation of all sourcing information (such as components, bills of materials (BOM), and related data) in a single file location while building RFQs, allowing buyers to easily view and track progress.

TMaster records and scorecards can capture all relevant supplier characteristics, such as plant metrics, certifications, and supplier capabilities. Company suppliers can participate in the RFQ process within the same environment, and can even suggest Engineering Change Requests (ECRs) and collaborate early and throughout the product lifecycle.

With our 3DEXPERIENCE® Platform, engineering and manufacturing departments can collaborate more efficiently with suppliers, resulting in reduced development costs and accelerated time-to-market.

• Enhance process standardization and efficiency of the RFQ process.
• Improve collaboration between engineering, purchasing, and strategic suppliers.
• Lower operational costs, shorten supplier turnaround time on responses, and improve bid quality
• Minimize costs and risks, and improve downstream quality by reviewing supplier change requests earlier in the development process
• Enhance strategic sourcing by having supplier capability, quality, and performance information readily available to buyers

Provide integrated virtual assembly simulation, preventing errors and saving costs

Wind turbine manufacturing looks for solutions to increase production quickly and lower costs, while maintaining high quality and efficiency.

Dassault Systèmes Sustainable Wind Turbines design-for-manufacturing approach enables you to plan in a virtual environment, validate manufacturing processes before start of production, identify and resolve issues up front, and manufacture products “right the first time”. From the early stages of product development, digital manufacturing involving planning, scheduling, sequencing, and programming resources can be defined to create improved processes, preventing problems and delays from arising later when products are ready to be built. These tools can help you optimize flexible and lean manufacturing.

Automated manufacturing methods, such as using robotics or CNC machines, are commonly used to offer greater flexibility, increased quality, reduced waste, and increased standardization while improving worker health and safety. Investments in such production systems are costly, but can be justified with the reduced cost and time of validation in a virtual environment.

• Concurrent engineering and manufacturing process definition to validate early manufacturability
• Verification and validation of manufacturing processes and production programs to minimize production issues and costs
  .
• Capitalize and re-use your company’s know-how, standard processes, and best practices.
• Minimize cycle time, increase throughput of the production facility, and optimally use resources

Process control for blade production excellence

Producing composite blades is a challenging process that involves controlling variables and understanding the correlation between them. Preventing production defects from unexplained voids, wrinkles, delamination, and other defects is complex. Many companies experience very high rejection rates during blade production, some even greater than 25 percent. Even a small improvement in the rejection rate can save millions of dollars per year.

Dassault Systèmes Sustainable Wind Turbines provides a unique, data-driven, rule-based continuous process improvement methodology for blade manufacturing. The analysis of shop floor data enables you to discover hidden root causes of defects. Describing best practices in natural language rules enables you to capitalize and reuse acquired knowledge. By monitoring shop floor data, the risk of defects can be quantified and you can develop “agile process control”, enabling experts to extract, optimize, and validate a robust set of easy-to-read operational best practices.

• Discover and edit rules with experts (knowledge capture)
• Quickly identify root causes of failure.
• Understand quantified influence of process variables
• Obtain advance warning of potential problems
• Adjust process in real-time to changing conditions
• Monitor rule compliance and receive notification when new rules may be needed.