Ewec

SAMTECH, a European specialist in development of Computer Aided Engineering software and advanced FEA modeling technology, held a side event at the European Wind energy Exhibition and Conference (EWEC 2009). The SAMTECH side event scheduled on 17 March at 14h demonstrated to the wind energy industry the power and user-friendliness of the latest release of its engineering software platform “SAMCEF for Wind Turbines (S4WT)”. S4WT is dedicated to the prediction of dynamic loads on Wind Turbine components, through a global model of the whole wind turbine, with or without gearbox.

Building highly reliable wind turbines is an important challenge for the future of the wind turbines industry. It is crucial to remain competitive, to reduce wind turbines time-to-market as well as prohibitive maintenance costs and time during which wind turbines are idle due to mechanical problems. In order to provide an answer to these requirements, SAMTECH used its 20 years experience in the modelling of large flexible machines and its 10 years expertise in Wind Energy to create SAMCEF for Wind Turbines (S4WT), that is now a very general and open professional framework dedicated to the Virtual Prototyping of Wind Turbines.

S4WT can be used at different levels in the wind turbine engineering process and by different engineering teams pursuing the same goals (loads groups, transmission departments, component teams, integration programs…). It is made of two main parts that will be demonstrated during the workshop: S4WT Modeler for sub-models creation and S4WT Desktop for automated computations and post-processing of the whole wind turbine model with aerodynamic forces and control.

The S4WT side event was held on 17 March from 14:00 - 18:00, with three one-hour sessions (first session starting at 14:30, second session starting at 15:30 and last session starting at 16.30).

After the technical presentations of the conference, the participants had the opportunity to ask questions and interact with SAMTECH teams.