Preface: Special Issue for the First International Conference on Next Generation of Wind Energy (ICNGWE), 2014

Abstract

The selected papers from the conference cover a broad range of topics that are of fundamental and practical importance for wind energy production and utilization. The papers were invited from lead experts in the field worldwide that provided opportunities for discussion and extension. All papers were then reviewed according to the ASME journal standard and the guest editors handled the reviews. Although rotor blade failure prevention has received considerable attention from wind turbine manufacturers and research scientists, there is a limited understanding of the role of physics and fluid dynamics in failure prevention. In addition, the selfhealing concept to prevent damage or failure of wind turbine blades is innovative and new to the wind energy industry. Icing and deicing are important issues for wind mills operating in cold climate. Development and applications of new and innovative as well as advanced technologies in experimental and computational methods are needed. The papers in this issue concern: (1) some key issues for design of offshore wind foundations; (2) challenges, trends, and novel ideas for future wind energy harvesting and how to achieve greater efficiency; (3) selfhealing polymer composites for application in wind turbine blades; (4) icing physics, antiicing and deicing principles, and advantages and disadvantages of passive and active deicing mitigation techniques; (5) design of scour protection systems in offshore wind farms; (6) advances in design of wind turbine blades for wind turbines with a horizontal axis, and performance of new slotted blade design and tubercle blades; (7) optimization of wind turbine efficiency by using deformable structures in smart blades; (8) experiments on aerodynamics and performance of a vertical axis wind turbine in confined and unconfined environments; (9) on aerodynamic design by small scale turbine testing in wind tunnels at low Reynolds numbers; (10) influences of seawaves on the aerodynamics of offshore wind turbines; and (11) shape optimization of wind turbine blades by an artificial bee colony algorithm.