Engineer - Turbine Operability

Job Description Summary

The vision of the Tuning and Operations team is to create customer value by delivering products with highest availability by minimizing risks from turbine operability related aspects and deliver quick return to service by timely and effective resolution of fleet issues.

The role of the Operability engineer includes enabling wind turbine optimization via appropriate control tuning of core operational and supervisory turbine control algorithms. This should result in wind turbine products capable of meeting targets on availability, high performance, levelized cost of energy (LCOE) as well as compliance with specific market segment regulations in terms of noise, grid code, etc.

Job Description

Roles and Responsibilities

• Progressive retirement of operability related engineering risks as part of the different phases of a new product introduction (NPI) cycle, ensuring turbine operation displays adequate levels of closed-loop stability, availability, robustness, and compliance to market-specific requirements such as grid codes, noise, cold weather, etc.
• Perform controller tuning and operability assessments, collaborate with other sub-system and cross-functional teams for delivering on new products with high quality, from conceptual design to product validation stage; Project specific assessments to support new unit sales in ITO phase or project execution in OTR phase; Fleet issue resolution and root case analysis projects.
• Enable the realization of system level tradeoffs (Energy production v/s Loads, etc.) via application of controls technologies/solutions, to minimize turbine cost while pushing envelope on turbine performance and availability.
• Adopt new controller features and algorithms developed by the Controls organization as well as the ability to tune them to meet specific wind turbine systems trade-offs.

Required Qualifications

• Master’s degree from an accredited university in Controls Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related disciplines with specialization in Controls.
• Familiarity with aspects of controls theory such as system modelling, closed-loop design, and closed-loop analysis.
• Knowledge in wind turbine controls tuning and optimization.
• Strong oral and written communication skills in English.

Desired Characteristics

• Knowledge of high-fidelity multibody simulation (MBS) software for aeroelastic simulations (Simpack, Flex5, Bladed, Hawc2, Adams, etc.). Some years of aeroelastic simulation experience applied to wind turbines.
• Experience in controller code development for wind turbines. Wind turbine system design experience.
• Basic proficiency in Matlab/Python programming, as well as GitHub version control.

• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and presentation skills, including ability and willingness to work across cultural boundaries in a global team.

Additional Information

Relocation Assistance Provided: Yes