The Ultimate Operational Tool for Early Fault Detection to Minimize Equipment Failure and Optimize Wind Park Performance

In recent years, wind turbines have grown from small kilowatt class turbines to multi-MW class turbines. Wind farms now contribute utility size energy blocks to the grid and demand the same high-level operations and maintenance practices as conventional power plants. An important feature of these conventional power plant operations and maintenance practices is the utilization of state-of-the-art condition monitoring systems, which have, until very recently, been lacking in the wind industry.

These condition monitoring systems have the following objectives:

The insurance industry has been the prime mover in forcing the industry to begin to adopt condition monitoring systems because of the extent to which the wind industry has experienced (1) failure of major components long before they reach their design lives and (2) significantly higher maintenance and repair costs than planned. However, thus far, the use of condition monitoring by the industry is in its early stages and wind park owners and operators have had difficulty determining what condition monitoring systems they should install to comply with these new insurance requirements, and how to interpret and use the raw data which is provided by the various condition monitoring systems once they are installed.

To assist the industry with these challenges, WindRisk delivers the industry a "Best-of-Breed" condition monitoring system, which can in each case be custom-tailored to fit the many different turbine designs and to specifically address the critical components for each turbine model. WindRisk’s condition monitoring system exceeds the specifications currently being developed by the insurance industry through combining state-ofthe- art continuous vibration monitoring with on-line oil particle detection, temperature monitoring, nacelle movement monitoring, tower & foundation stress monitoring, blade flap and edgewise deflection monitoring, as well as transient process analysis, to accurately assess the health of individual components and of the entire wind turbine machinery system.

WindRisk’s objective in providing a condition monitoring package that exceeds the requirements of the insurance industry is to provide on-going assessment of the overall machine health and status within its lifecycle, through the use of overlapping sensor technologies and intelligent analytical software systems which provide easily comprehensible analysis and prescriptive reports from the raw sensor data. These together form the basis of WindRisk’s proactive predictive and preventive maintenance strategy so as to enable early detection of faults and the scheduling of maintenance actions to avoid catastrophic failure of components, thus maximizing the machine lifecycle, as well as, in the case of new turbines under manufacturer’s warranty, maximizing the effectiveness of the warranty from the wind park owner’s perspective.

In order to achieve its condition monitoring systems objective, WindRisk has gained a major competitive advantage through joining with DLI Engineering Corporation (a wholly-owned subsidiary of ABB) whose researchers have designed and implemented cutting-edge condition monitoring systems for over 35 years (including for the US Navy’s nuclear aircraft carrier fleet). The resulting WindRisk condition monitoring systems package, in exceeding the requirements of the insurance industry as the "Best of Breed" condition monitoring system, is effectively the "iPod" condition monitoring system for the wind industry because it reduces its competition to the status of merely ordinary "MP3 players".