Abstract. Hydrological observatories bear a lot of resemblance to the more traditional research catchment concept, but tend to differ in providing more long-term facilities that transcend the lifetime of individual projects, are more strongly geared towards performing interdisciplinary research, and are often designed as networks to assist in performing collaborative science. This paper illustrates how the experimental and monitoring set-up of an observatory, the 66 ha Hydrological Open Air Laboratory (HOAL) in Petzenkirchen, Lower Austria, has been established in a way that allows meaningful hypothesis testing. The overarching science questions guided site selection, identification of dissertation topics and the base monitoring. The specific hypotheses guided the dedicated monitoring and sampling, individual experiments, and repeated experiments with controlled boundary conditions. The purpose of the HOAL is to advance the understanding of water-related flow and transport processes involving sediments, nutrients and microbes in small catchments. The HOAL catchment is ideally suited for this purpose, because it features a range of different runoff generation processes (surface runoff, springs, tile drains, wetlands), the nutrient inputs are known, and it is convenient from a logistic point of view as all instruments can be connected to the power grid and a high-speed glassfibre local area network (LAN). The multitude of runoff generation mechanisms in the catchment provides a genuine laboratory where hypotheses of flow and transport can be tested, either by controlled experiments or by contrasting sub-regions of different characteristics. This diversity also ensures that the HOAL is representative of a range of catchments around the world, and the specific process findings from the HOAL are applicable to a variety of agricultural catchment settings.

This paper presents a review of existing theory and practice relating to main bearings for wind turbines. The main bearing performs the critical role of supporting the turbine rotor, with replacements typically requiring its complete removal. The operational conditions and loading for wind turbine main bearings deviate significantly from those of more conventional power plants and other bearings present in the wind turbine power train, i.e. those in the gearbox and generator. This work seeks to thoroughly document current main-bearing theory in order to allow for appraisal of existing design and analysis practices, while also seeking to form a solid foundation for future research in this area. The most common main-bearing setups are presented along with standards for bearing selection and rating. Typical loads generated by a wind turbine rotor, and subsequently reacted at the main bearing, are discussed. This is followed by the related tribological theories of lubrication, wear and associated failure mechanisms. Finally, existing techniques for bearing modelling, fault diagnosis and prognosis relevant to the main bearing are presented.Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Academy of Wind Energy e.V.

The following paper provides an overview of a novel wind turbine concept known as the X-Rotor Offshore Wind Turbine. The X-Rotor is a new wind turbine concept that aims to reduce the cost of energy from offshore wind. Cost reductions are achieved through reduced capital costs and reduced maintenance costs. The following paper includes results from an early feasibility study completed on the concept. In the feasibility study exemplary designs were created and structural analyses were carried out. Turbine capital costs and maintenance cost of the X-Rotor concept were then roughly estimated. X-Rotor turbine costs and O&M costs were compared to four existing wind turbine types to investigate potential cost savings from the X-Rotor concept. Results show that the X-Rotor has potential to reduce O&M costs by up to 55% and capital costs by up to 32%. The combination of the capital cost and O&M cost savings show potential to reduce the CoE by up to 26%.

SUMMARYEarthquake dynamic response analysis of large complex structures, especially in the presence of nonlinearities, usually turns out to be computationally expensive. In this paper, the methodical developments of a new model order reduction strategy (MOR) based on the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method as well as its practical applicability to a realistic building structure are presented. The seismic performance of the building structure, a medical complex, is to be improved by means of base isolation realized by frictional pendulum bearings. According to the new introduced MOR strategy, a set of deterministic POD modes (transformation matrix) is assembled, which is derived based on the information of parts of the response history, so-called snapshots, of the structure under a representative earthquake excitation. Subsequently, this transformation matrix is utilized to create reduced-order models of the structure subjected to different earthquake excitations. These sets of nonlinear low-order representations are now solved in a fractional amount of time in comparison with the computations of the full (non-reduced) systems. The results demonstrate accurate approximations of the physical (full) responses by means of this new MOR strategy if the probable behavior of the structure has already been captured in the POD snapshots.

This paper provides new formulations to derive the impulse response matrix, which is then used in the problem of load identification with application to wind induced vibration. The applied loads are inversely identified based on the measured structural responses by solving the associated discrete ill-posed problem. To this end — based on an existing parametric structural model — the impulse response functions of acceleration, velocity and displacement have been computed. Time discretization of convolution integral has been implemented according to an existing and a newly proposed procedure, which differ in the numerical integration methods. The former was evaluated based on a constant rectangular approximation of the sampled data and impulse response function in a number of steps corresponding to the sampling rate, while the latter interpolates the sampled data in an arbitrary number of sub-steps and then integrates over the sub-steps and steps. The identification procedure was implemented for a simulation example as well as an experimental laboratory case. The ill-conditioning of the impulse response matrix made it necessary to use Tikhonov regularization to recover the applied force from noise polluted measured response. The optimal regularization parameter has been obtained by L-curve and GCV method. The results of simulation represent good agreement between identified and measured force. In the experiments the identification results based on the measured displacement as well as acceleration are provided. Further it is shown that the accuracy of experimentally identified load depends on the sensitivity of measurement instruments over the different frequency ranges.