A Framework for Wind Energy Conversion to Promote Sustainability in Product Design Available to Purchase

This paper presents a sustainable design method for wind turbines. Sustainable design recognizes three main pillars; economic growth, social equity, and environmental protection. A framework is developed to observe the tradeoffs among these areas of sustainable design. Each pillar of sustainability is mapped to a design variable, and normalized objective functions are defined. For the economic component, the objective function is based on costs and power production. The societal objective function focuses on noise and aesthetics impacts. These are represented by risk averse utility functions. Carbon dioxide emissions and noise pollution are the environmental objectives. A multi-objective genetic algorithm is also used with Pareto optimality to identify tradeoffs between these three sustainability factors. Wind speed data from three sites is used to simulate the performance of the system. The sets of data are unique and represent low, medium, and high wind speed areas. In all three cases, the results indicate that the economic and environmental objectives can both be met with a relatively small tradeoff. However, a greater amount of tradeoff is necessary when considering societal impacts.