Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.
Wind energy is well recognized as the nearest
commercialized renewable energy technologies besides the
water resource, it has high priority by governments, is
developing rapidly worldwide. In the field of wind power,
single megawatt wind power unit is becoming the mainstream
of technology development and market demand [1]. On the one
hand it is needed to optimize the generator structure to reduce
heat generation [2], more importantly, efficient cooling system
is needed to protect the generator [3].
Air-water cooled and air-air cooled are the main cooling
mode for wind power generator coolers. For the air cooled type,
most of the current application has simple smooth tube bundle
structure, it is larger in size and heavier in weight, it has higher
energy consumption and sometimes unable to meet the cooling
requirements during hot summer. Lightweight design is the
trends, a new type thermosyphon air cooled heat exchanger is
developed, compared with the conventional one, preliminary
studies indicate that it is about 29% smaller in size, 13.4%
lighter in weight, 16.3% saved in energy consumption and
14.6% improved in cooling capacity.
