‘World’s Largest’: Chinese Company Installs 15-MW Onshore Wind Turbine

A Chinese company has installed what it calls the world’s largest onshore wind turbine. Sany Group, a multinational firm known for its manufacturing of heavy equipment, on October 9 announced a 15-MW wind turbine has been placed in service at a site in Tongyu, Jilin Province, in China.

Sany said the machine is a prototype and will be tested over the next year to “thoroughly verify” its reliability. The company said the model SI-270150 is the largest onshore turbine in terms of single-unit capacity, and also has the largest rotor diameter—270 meters—of any onshore turbine installed worldwide to date.

Sany said the turbine has a design life of 25 to 30 years. The turbine blade is 131 meters long. The company said the SI-270150 features “a lightweight design and intelligent load reduction technologies, which reduce the overall load and facilitate long-distance land transportation.” The drivetrain includes a dual tapered roller bearing, or TRB, integrated main shaft support system, which helps ensure high load-bearing capacity and stability, according to the company.

The first 131-meter-long blade rolled off the production line at the Bayannur Intelligent Industrial Park in January of this year, Sany officials said. The company has said that as the length of blade increases, “the requirements for stiffness and strength are also higher, otherwise issues such as stall and classical flutter might occur, resulting in increased vibration, even breaking of the blade. To address such challenges, by adopting an optimized airfoil design featuring large thickness and blunt trailing edge, the overall absolute thickness of SANY RE’s SY1310A wind turbine blade is significantly improved.”

The company said it has introduced several new technologies in the manufacturing process of the blade. Sany said those include “self-designed fiberglass pre-quilting technology, long-distance automatic infusion technology for large and composite blade, and three-dimensional design technology for trailing edge blind bonding insert, etc., transforming the traditional manual manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing and enhancing the lean production with digital intelligence. In addition, recyclable polyurethane structural parts are also adopted to enhance the recyclability of ultra-long blades.”

Chinese companies already have deployed the world’s largest offshore wind turbines, as well as the largest floating offshore wind platform.

—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).