With Earth Week scheduled for April 21-25, a spokeswoman at National Instruments shared this energy application with an environmental focus:
“The U.S. Department of Energy is counting on wind power to meet 20% of the nation's power needs by 2030 (up from 3% today), which means advancing technologies are playing an increasingly critical role in developing offshore wind power. Using National Instruments (NI) integrated hardware and software tools, Clemson University unveiled the world's largest 15-MW wind turbine drivetrain test facility to create new technologies for the energy market last November.
“Today, the facility has expanded to include a grid simulation lab that makes it possible for manufacturers to test both the mechanical and electrical characteristics of their machines in a controlled environment. With this advanced testing center, companies can test a hardware prototype for any energy resource on a utility scale up to an unprecedented 15 MW while also gauging the impact of adding this technology to the actual grid before deploying it.
“Successfully integrating wind power into the existing electric power grid is a complex process that relies on a distributed and interconnected system like the cyber-physical systems (CPS) that are proliferating within the engineering industry. NI has spoken to this trend in the 2014 NI Trend Watch and believes a platform-based design approach leveraging holistic development solutions and commercial off-the-shelf hardware will help engineers achieve better CPS designs. NI’s LabVIEW reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture is optimized to address this need.”
