Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbines
Wind energy is one of the most popular and fastest growing renewable energy sources in the world today. The average annual growth in new wind turbine installations has been over 27% over the last 5 years.
As wind turbines play a greater role in the national grid systems, so does their maintainability and reliability in the energy production economics. Maintenance service is difficult in remote locations and offshore wind farms, so catastrophic failures can be very expensive. Condition monitoring of wind turbines is therefore an essential part of the maintenance strategy to minimize unplanned downtime.
The widely variable operating conditions coupled with non-rigid foundations, compact construction, complex gearbox and both very low and very high rotating speeds and locations far from the condition monitoring centre require an entirely different monitoring approach to traditional rotating machines. Condition monitoring requirements for wind trubines are unique. You must combine low cost, early and reliable fault detection, accurate fault diagnosis, and the ability to handle input from several thousand transducers in a system where no faults must be missed and no false alarms are acceptable.
Identifying the type and location of a fault is an important function of the condition monitoring system, but this is only half the equation. Specialist expertise is needed to more accurately determine its severity and establish a lead-time to failure. Such expertise is hard to come by, and many operators do not have it. For many, the optimal monitoring solution for wind turbines is therefore a combined monitoring system/service concept.
Brüel & Kjær Vibro was one of the first companies to develop such a product/service concept 6 years ago. Both the condition monitoring system and our condition monitoring services are Germanischer Lloyd certified, and we continue to deliver this unique solution world-wide.
Browse through the web pages to find out more, contact us at wind@bkvibro.com, or call your local sales representative.
