Application Of Heat Pipe Heat Exchanger On Wind Turbine Generator

As one kind of clean energy source,wind power is widely used by many countries.Due to the structural characteristics of the wind tower,it is required that the heat exchanger of the generator should meet the requirements of small size,light weight and excellent heat dissipation potential.Tube-shell heat exchanger is currently the most popular structure applied for wind turbine generators,and the improvement of its’ performance usually depends on the number and the diameter of tubes,which is difficult to meet the compact and lightweight requirements.So one kind of heat pipe heat exchangers is specially developed for wind turbine generators in this paper,and the test results are beyond compare.Firstly,the numerical simulation tool has been compared with the test result based on small sample structure,they has good agreement to each other,so this method is also used in the subsequent research work.Then,the effects of different structural parameters,tube arrangement and different angle of heat pipe were studied by CFD and experiment.Finally,based on all the works above,a new-style heat pipe heat exchanger was developed special for the double-fed generator set of 1.5MW wind turbine,and it was comprehensively compared with the traditional popular high-efficiency air-cooler.It is showed that better heat transfer performance can be achieved when the flow direction of wind and fluid is reversed,the staggered pipes arrangement and small inclination angle of the heat pipes is.And the tube pitch and the number of tube rows will also affect the performance of the heat exchanger.In addition,compared with the traditional and high efficiency air-cooler which is being applied on the 1.5MW wind turbine generator widely,the heat pipe cooling system has great advantages such as: the temperature on stator surface is more lower,the heat balance time needed is more shorter,it’s more smaller and lighter and has more lower operating cost,and the capital outlay will be recouped in shorter period.It is foreseeable that this new heat pipe heat exchangers will have a broad application in wind power field in the future.