By Arve Sandve, Business Development Manager/Principal Consultant, Lloyd’s Register Consulting, Norway
Lloyd’s Register Consulting has developed a CFD simulation tool to help protect personnel against the risk of fire in the nacelle by determining the likely dispersion of heat or gases.
Fire and gas incidents on a wind turbine are recognised as major hazards to the safety of personnel and assets – particularly if the rotors should catch fire, too. That said, there’s no need to panic: even with the number of moving parts and the sheer amount of electricity generated in an offshore turbine, the risk of a fire is very low indeed. But wherever there’s a risk, there’s a job to be done from a safety perspective.
Recognising this, Lloyd’s Register Consulting in Norway is developing a tool to help make installing and operating offshore wind turbines a safer workplace for all.
MAJOR HAZARD
A fire or gas incident would most likely be caused by the technical failure of electrical or mechanical components, or of systems located a hundred metres or more above sea level. A small fire, unchecked, could quickly spread to the nacelle where, you might say, things would really start to heat up.
Naturally, a burning turbine is dangerous to approach, making it difficult and unsafe to exercise timely damage control. And on the business side of things, the cost of damages can quickly mount up, with total loss of the turbine a highly probably scenario, not to mention the considerable loss of daily revenue.
EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS
With such heavy implications for people and business, risk analysis and emergency preparedness plans are increasingly focusing on the importance of realistic fire scenarios. And safety system designers are hard at work figuring out the best procedures for evacuating or rescuing personnel from a wind turbine in the event of a fire. For the moment, the main area of focus concerns how to mitigate such hazards through improved technical design.
To make things more complicated, wind turbine technology is constantly evolving. Electronic components and other systems such as gearboxes are regularly re-designed. And present and future plans for offshore wind farms call for more remote offshore locations. As a result, the prospect of fire and gas incidents affecting technical personnel in such locations demands new tools for assessing and mitigating undesired incidents within the existing framework of risk management and emergency-preparedness planning.
THE OFFSHORE CHALLENGE
Given the challenges of the offshore environment and their operating model, offshore wind turbines are considerably more closed compared with their onshore cousins. Traditional fire and gas approaches, therefore, don’t provide a proper picture of actual fire or gas dispersion, or account for loads based on realistic operational scenarios.
As with any engineering design task, reliable data and precise scenarios are key to finding the optimal solution. And this is exactly where Lloyd’s Register Consulting’s fire risk simulation tool comes into play, helping wind turbine engineers to determine the dispersion of heat or gases during a fire in the nacelle.
The offshore WTG fire risk simulation tool is based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technology. In essence, that means the same computer modeling software approach already used in wind energy to assess wind flows and support blade design. CFD tools have been applied to solve offshore risk management challenges for many years, particularly in the oil and gas sector, combining software simulation and risk analysis methodologies to paint an accurate picture of fire and gas loads. Until now, however, no tool had been developed to determine the exact dispersion of heat or gases during a fire in an offshore wind turbine nacelle.
Fire risk simulation works by setting up various nacelle configurations and operating conditions, then simulating a fire in the enclosed nacelle. Smoke, heat, flames and gas combustion are assessed, providing new information that can point to the best locations for fire detectors, for example, or to evaluate escape ways. Insights into the effects of heat exposure on the turbine structure can also be gained, along with systematic assessment of active fire water systems.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The tool is timely, particularly as turbine manufacturers move to refine their fire safety capabilities, introducing automatic fire detection and extinguishing systems specifically for offshore wind turbines. Lloyd’s Register Consulting’s fire risk simulation capability is likely to become an integrated part of future risk analysis for offshore wind farms, supporting manufacturers, operators and service providers in ensuring greater safety both for personnel and offshore asset investments.
ABOUT ARVE SANDVE
A principal consultant at Lloyd’s Register Consulting, Arve Sandve has more than 15 years of experience in risk management and emergency preparedness planning. He has been engaged with risk analysis and emergency preparedness planning in several wind projects, including Hywind Demo, Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon Windfarm.
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