Review of the Cooling Technology for High-power Wind Turbines

With the increasing of wind turbine unit capacity, heat load of thermal dissipation components of the unit increase greatly. In order to make the unit long-term stably and efficiency operation, the research and development of cooling system with high efficiency and low energy consumption become particularly important. The main sources of waste heat and the widely used six kinds of cooling technology was described. Also there is a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of each one, and the gravity heat pipe was designed which is instead of the above cooling systems. This cooling technology have high heat transfer efficiency and no cooling medium delivery device and simple structure and low initial investment and operating costs.