Page 11 - North American Clean Energy May/June 2019 Issue

Justin McKennon is the Chief Engineer and Manager of Engineering and Simulation at NTS Lightning Technologies. Justin also is the chair of the SAE Commercial Space Committee. Justin has a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He has published dozens of papers on the use of simulation tools, and is widely regarded as an expert in electromagnetics and numerical analysis.
NTS /// www.nts.com
Figure 4. Simulation results showing the current density on a sample wind turbine blade made of several carbon stacks.
loads, and damage here greatly reduces the lifetime of the blade and, in some cases, can lead to catastrophic blade loss. More current in the carbon is something engineers want to seriously avoid.
e isotropic case grossly overestimates the amount of current in the carbon because it ignores the very real orientation-dependent resistances in the carbon (Figure 5). Such an overestimate would introduce additional challenges that are not present, thus slowing down the development process, and leading to an overengineered product.
Reliable Results for Business Decisions
e ability to rapidly simulate and turn around models greatly reduces program risk, and allows for engineering level data to be obtained almost on-demand. In many cases, critical data simply cannot be measured on real test articles, which requires simulation and analysis to ll
in these holes. Rather than spending considerable amounts of time and money fabricating complex test articles, simulation helps to analyze the physical phenomena, drastically reducing the problem scope for these projects.
Figure 5. A plot demonstrating the current levels in the isotropic and anisotropic carbon cases.
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