Industrial User Facility

NREL's Industrial User Facility (IUF) at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) provides office space for industry researchers, experimental laboratories, computer facilities for analytical work, and space for assembling components and turbines for atmospheric testing. The facility also houses two blade stands equipped with overhead cranes and servo-hydraulic systems, control rooms, a high bay, and several smaller test bays that protect proprietary information while companies disassemble turbines to analyze, test, and modify individual components. In the high bay, NWTC researchers conduct a full range of structural evaluations on turbine blades, including ultimate static-strength, fatigue, vibration, and nondestructive tests. The IUF and NREL's expertise help industry partners verify and improve new blade designs, analyze blade structural properties, and improve their manufacturing processes.

As wind turbines grow in size and their blades become longer and more flexible, it becomes more difficult to test the blades for endurance. At the same time, test methods developed for smaller blades have become more expensive and less effective. To test the new, larger blades, NREL installed a larger blade test stand capable of testing blades up to 50 m in length.

NREL also recently developed a novel hydraulic resonance blade test system. The new test system uses one-third as much energy as the previous system, and the blade oscillates at more than twice the conventional rate. It now takes less than 2 months (the previous system test took up to 4 months) to apply 3 million cycles to fatigue test a blade. The new system, which will test blades manufactured for giant multimegawatt turbines, is the only one of its kind in the world.