Richard Court

Newcastle University | NCL · School of Engineering

Loss of recoverable resources in linear resource flow systems is likely to contribute to the depletion of natural resources and environmental degradation. The 'waste hierarchy' in the European Commission's latest Waste Framework Directive 2008/98/EC (WFD2008) makes recommendations on how to address this issue. The WFD2008 is analysed in this work f...

Increasing pressure on economic actors has produced a degree of standardization and commensuration of carbon emissions reporting and an increasing amount of comparable data is in the public domain. We have recently developed a method for interpreting this data-set to produce a league table of sustainability performance: actors are ranked according...

Increasing deployment of large wind turbines (WT) offshore and in remote areas requires reliable condition monitoring (CM) techniques to guarantee the high availability of these WTs and economic return. To meet this need, much effort has been expended to improve the capability of analysing the WT CM signals. However, a fully satisfactory technique...

Full scale blade fatigue testing is required to verify that the horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) blades posses the strength and service life specified in the design. Unfortunately, fatigue tests must be run for a long time period, which has led blade testing laboratories to seek ways of accelerating fatigue testing time and reducing the costs of...

Condition monitoring (CM) has long been recognised as one of the best methods of reducing the operation and maintenance (O&M) costs of wind turbines (WTs). However, its potential in the wind industry has not been fully exploited. One of the major reasons is due to the lack of an efficient tool to properly process the WT CM signals, which are usuall...

Bearings are critical components in the products of many industries, and their failure can result in long downtime and costly maintenance. Prolonging a bearing’s service in a safe manner is vital for operators of equipment, and condition monitoring is regarded as one of the best approaches to achieve this. In general practice, condition monitoring...

Horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) blades are a critical component of wind turbines. Full-scale blade fatigue testing is required to verify that the blades possess the strength and service life specified in the design. Unfortunately, fatigue tests must be run for a long time period, which has led blade testing laboratories to seek ways of accelera...

Induction generators have been successfully applied to a variety of industries. However, their operation and maintenance in renewable wind and marine energy industries still face challenges due to harsh environments, limited access to site and relevant reliability issues. Hence, further enhancing their condition monitoring is regarded as one of the...

Wind turbines are being increasingly deployed in remote onshore and offshore areas due to the richer wind resource there and the advantages of mitigating the land use and visual impact issues. However, site accessing difficulties and the shortage of proper transportation and installation vehicles/vessels are challenging the operation and maintenanc...

The fatigue behaviour of fibre reinforced composites is difficult to predict because of their anisotropic strength and stiffness characteristics. This can lead to several different failure modes depending on the magnitude, direction and frequency of the applied loading. For wind turbine blades extensive material testing is therefore required for ea...

Condition monitoring is beneficial to the wind industry for both onshore and offshore plants. However, due to the variations in operational conditions, its potential has not been fully explored. There is a need to develop an operational-condition-independent condition monitoring technique, which has motivated the research presented here. In this pa...

Full-scale fatigue testing is part of the certification process for large wind turbine blades. That testing is usually performed about the flapwise and edgewise axes independently but a new method for resonant fatigue testing has been developed in which the flapwise and edgewise directions are tested simultaneously, thus also allowing the interacti...

This article presents a novel method in extracting fatigue damage from the stress-time history of the horizontal axis wind turbine blades. A novel method based on wavelet transform (WT) is proposed to shorten the length of the stress-time history. Based on Morlet wavelet (Morl), WT is taken to the stress-time history to generate a plot of accumulat...

Condition monitoring of induction machinery is traditionally implemented by conducting spectral analysis of either vibration or stator current signals, because it is believed that once a fault occurs, it will produce a unique characteristic frequency in the signals. Hence, the fault and its further growth can be detected and traced through observin...

Increasing deployment of large wind turbines offshore and in remote areas urgently requires reliable and efficient condition monitoring techniques to achieve high turbine availability and the expected economic return. Much effort has been made in the past a few years to develop advanced signal processing technologies to improve wind turbine conditi...

The Adhesives Design Toolkit provides easily accessible design guidance for both the user already familiar with the advantages of adhesives, and for potential users who would not normally have considered adhesives as a viable joining option. The Toolkit is available electronically, is interactive, and is accessible via the internet/web.

An investigation into the durability of adhesively bonded joints has been undertaken to help improve the prediction of joint lifetimes. Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) substrates have been bonded with a two-part acrylic adhesive to make single lap-shear joints. Joints have been aged in a hot/wet environment (40°C and 95% humidity) with no applied str...

The use of fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) composites for large structures is becoming more widespread. With composites increasingly called upon to replace structures traditionally fabricated from metals the requirement to find suitable methods of providing adequate electromagnetic shielding (EMS) is often of prime importance. This paper describes a...

The mode I interlaminar fracture toughness of woven aramid-fibre/epoxy resin laminates has been investigated as a function of the fabric weave and the fabric surface texture used in the construction of the laminates. The experimental values of GIC were found to increase significantly with increasing crack length for all the materials investigated....