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- Category: Articles
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.
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.
By Agner Hansen, Product-Quality, Denmark
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- Category: Articles
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.By Muthuvetpillai Jegatheeson, Director, Gyro Energy Limited, New Zealand
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- Category: Articles
A New Generation of Oils for High Loaded Gears in Wind Power Stations
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.By Dipl. Ing. Hermann Siebert, Klüber Lubrication München KG, Munich
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- Category: Articles
Issues for Planning of Offshore Wind Farms
Satellites orbiting and observing Earth offer potential for the offshore wind farm industry. Of particular interest are the images from the Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) on board satellites belonging to the European Space Agency (ESA): the satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2 from 1992 to present and Envisat from 2002 to present. In the April/May 2005 issue of Windtech International we published an article about this topic. The current article describes more specific issues concerning offshore wind farms.By Merete Bruun Christiansen, Charlotte Bay Hasager, Risø National Laboratory, Denmark and Frank Monaldo, Johns Hopkins University, USA
- Category: Articles
Prevention of Operational Hazards and Enhancing the Ongoing Maintenance
Monitoring of the condition of rotor blades is performed visually by experts every one to two years, but it is very subjective and superficial. As is common in energy facilities, the increases in stress resulting from greater blade size, coupled with the rising prices for rotor blades, call for a new approach. The continuous monitoring of the status of highly stressed parts offers preventative maintenance as well as troubleshooting of existing problems.By Dr Peter Volkmer, Managing Director, IGUS, Germany
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- Category: Articles
The Development of an Ultra High-Performance Wind Turbine
Small wind turbines are used in situations that are quite different from those of large turbines, and it is the small turbine market that is now experiencing the entry of new companies seeking to benefit from its expected growth. While a growing market is good news, it has been argued that the levels of performance and safety need to be greatly improved, and prices drastically reduced, before small wind turbines are accepted by society in general. In this article, the author describes the concept of the Airdolphin.By Ryosuke Ito, President, Zephyr Corporation, Japan
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- Category: Articles
Reducing the costs of operation and maintenance offshore
ICD Projects designed a motion compensated platform following a request from the Norwegian shipowner FOB Shipping for an active heave compensated crane.
