Braking Concepts for a Long Gear Lifetime

Wind energy is environmentally friendly, yet it is not without competition. Preferences can quickly change to other sources of energy if wind turbines turn out to be too expensive or technically insecure. Despite the competitive struggle the wind energy business has with other sources of energy, there is also competition among the turbine manufacturers. The last few years have provided a little time to relax from the disaster of gear damage that shook almost the entire business. Mostly it was constantly hard applied fail-safe brakes that caused the damage to stall regulated machines. Fortunately, things have changed, but there are emerging Asian countries where manufacturers should learn from mistakes and experience in Europe so that they do not repeat the mistakes.

By Andreas Gerken, Svendborg Brakes, Germany

The performance of today’s wind turbines ranges from a few megawatts up to 10MW for prototypes already under development. With this increase in performance, the lubricant assumes an ever-greater importance, and it is a major element in the tribological system to be taken into account in the design of wind power stations. Only special lubricants are able to cope with the operating conditions of highly loaded components such as gears and enhance their reliability.

Wind Power Large-Scale Interconnection, Avoiding Gearbox Failures, and Cost Reduction

The potential advantages of GyroTorque for wind power generation were acknowledged by Garrad Hassan & Partners Ltd, UK, in their report titled Evaluation of GVT System for Wind Turbines dated 9 June 2004 and presentations at the Global Wind Power conferences held in Chicago (March 2004) and London (November 2004) and recommended further design study. This article briefly looks at how GTCVT works and how these potential benefits can be realised using GTCVT.

Failures Provide Valuable Information to Enhance Turbine Availability

A wind turbine is expected to run day and night for 20 years at an availability of 95–98% and only require maintenance every 6 months. As turbines get bigger they also tend to be more complex as a result of optimisations. The cost of having a turbine that is not producing when it is windy is increasing with turbine size. For that reason there is a strong need to identify and implement solutions that will make the turbines run close to 100% during windy periods.