Structural Engineer | Explore Careers

Meet Niklas

Find out what Niklas does each day as a wind turbine structural engineer.

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As an engineer, you have the opportunity to really contribute to society by developing a certain field of technology and it's often not considered in that way by the society how big the impact is that engineers have on their life.

My name is Niklas Meyn, I'm a structural engineer at ACT Blade and we're designing wind turbine blades. So this starts with making usually a model for what we are planning to design or build. And then we are finding strategies how to analyse if that structure that we're planning to do is going to survive the loads that we see on an actual wind turbine site. And then based on that we can optimise the structure that we're building.

Once we're happy with a design, we would be running it through a simulation programme, which allows us to predict how the blade behaves on a turbine on an actual wind site. And we would go through a couple of these cycles until we are satisfied with the results and to the point where we have an optimised wind turbine blade.

We can't continue with the energy production how it is done today. We see the impact that climate change has already. Wind turbine blades are just a huge opportunity for the society that can offer a massive supply of energy, which is completely sustainable.

The wind turbine behind us, for example, is greater than 7 megawatts with a diameter of 170 meters. And at the moment, the industry is trialing the first double-digit wind turbines meaning they produce 10 megawatts or more. And they usually have a diameter of 200 metre, 210, 220 metres. Thus operating a 10 megawatt wind turbine for an hour provides electricity for 5 households for a year. And this is in just one hour of operation of the wind turbine.

At ACT Blade, we've chosen a completely different approach to designing wind turbine blades. It's completely different from what the industry does at the moment. The background of our company is the sailing industry. So we have been supplying sail makers and ship designers with a toolbox that allowed them to design sails and optimise them for a certain type of ship.

So we want to carry this technology forward onto wind turbine blades to make them more lightweight than what they are at the moment. And it's a major contributor to the cost is how stiff you have to design the blade. So the textiles that we are using and also the ones that are used in the sailing industry are very, very flexible. That helps us to keep the cost down.

If you want to improve from the current status quo, and this is what we all thrive to do. You need to do research to do that. It is worth doing all of the research, although a lot of it fails just for the few cases where it is successful, and where you as a society you find a new way forward,

It's exciting just to be part of the industry that tries to make energy production and living on Earth more sustainable in the future.