Narec’s turbine test building handed over

The handover of the new building by Shepherd Construction concludes design and building works for three new facilities on the site.

The new building, a 35m high, 3,000m2 hall, has been designed and built to accommodate a test rig which will conduct performance, endurance and compressed life testing of complete nacelles up to 15MW rating. The rig will apply both torque and shaft loads.

Andrew Mill, chief executive at Narec said: “We will be the first independent facility to undertake accelerated life testing of a next generation offshore wind turbine. The early completion of building works is a significant achievement and we expect to have completed our first commercial test programme by the middle of next year. The entire facility is bespoke, designed and built to ensure that larger turbines can be brought into operation sooner. It will have a significant impact on the improved design and operation of offshore wind turbines in the UK over the next 20 years.”

The installation of the 15MW capacity test rig by GE Energy – Power Conversion is well underway onsite and involves a Permanent Magnet Motor (PMM) and the largest Force Application System (FAS) of its type in the world, weighing over 400 tonnes. Testing onshore improves the understanding of turbine performance and will verify new designs under simulated lifetime operating conditions and extreme events, such as storm conditions and electrical failures.

The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) is investing £25m in the Narec facility by providing funding to GE Energy – Power Conversion and MTS Systems Corporation for the design, development and commissioning of the test rig.

In April of this year, the project team for the construction of three new facilities at Narec were awarded the Robert Stephenson Award by The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) North East. This was presented to Narec, Red Box Design, Shepherd Construction, Arup, Turner & Townsend and Heyrod Construction. Highlighting the ‘great technical ingenuity in both the design and construction processes’ ICE judges commented: “the requirements of the scheme set unique challenges for the designers to understand and calculate the huge loads applied during the testing process and the construction demanded tolerances more normally associated with a laboratory than a construction site.”