establishing failure modes for bearings in wind turbines

PREVENTING RING FAILURES DUE TO ROTATIONAL

Extending gearbox life is critical to current and future wind energy projects Enormous axial loads impact the gear box assembly including bearings and planet gears in both directions The bearing race wears the resulting metal debris leads to bearing failure These bearings are typically secured via retaining rings designed to eliminate such

Power Engineering: Extending Bearing Life in Wind Turbine

Aug 23 2016Damage and failure modes are occurring sooner than expected and for many wind farm operators the cost of unexpected down tower repairs is adding up Wind turbines contain multiple bearings that each wears differently and today larger stresses in larger turbines are challenging conventional bearing designs

Investigations of Bearing Failures Associated with White

A critical problem for wind turbine gearboxes is failure of rolling element bearings where axial cracks form on the inner rings Metallurgical analyses show that the failure mode is associated with microstructural alterations manifested by white etching areas (WEAs) and white etching cracks (WECs)

A review of wind turbine main bearings: design operation

liability of wind turbines and their subcomponents an area which overall has received a lot of attention The motivation for this current review is the observation that the wind industry has identified wind turbine main-bearing (WTMB) failures as being a critical issue in terms of increasing wind turbine (WT) reliability and availabil-ity

Failure Atlas for Rolling Bearings in Wind Turbines

Failures in gearbox bearings have been a primary source of reliability issues for wind turbine drivetrains leading to costly downtime and unplanned maintenance The most common failure mode is attributed to so-called white-etching cracks (WECs)

All shook up: Managing vibration in wind turbines

Mar 11 2019The following factors are common reasons for abnormal vibration in wind turbines: Incorrect lubrication If bearings are not lubricated to a level that supports their required operating conditions they will not be able to rotate cleanly and excess friction will result in vibration and premature bearing

How IoT technology can improve offshore wind power

May 15 2020The hope is that the assembly of the cloud IoT and machine learning could transition wind turbine maintenance from a calendar-based corrective maintenance agenda to a conditioning schedule by analysing the real-time behaviour of turbines Key failure modes such as fatigue corrosion or wear have been analysed in order to evolve from the

The Cause of Premature Wind Turbine Bearing Failures

The resulting surface damage can initiate premature failure via wear (e g micropitting) or by reducing bearing fatigue life The results suggest that carrier bearing clearance non-torque load sharing and planet bearing underloading are significant contributors to the premature failures of wind turbine planet bearings

Tribological advancements for reliable wind turbine

The prevalent wear modes experienced by the three critical bearing locations of a wind turbine gearbox are micropitting smearing and flaking from the so-called white-etch areas A number of wind turbine gearbox designs initially used spherical roller bearings in the planet positions

TECHNICAL Premature Bearing Failures in Wind Gearboxes

the actual service life of wind turbine gearboxes is often less than the designed 20 years Failures can be found at several bearing locations namely the planet bearings intermediate shaft and high-speed shaft bearings (Fig 1) Much premature wind gearbox bearing damage results in a failure mode that is not caused by the classic rolling contact

Analytical Model of the Magnetic Field Distribution of a

To shorten the axial length of wind turbines increase the utilization of wind energy and eliminate the ff of rotor gravity a novel maglev wind turbine is proposed in this paper The structure of a maglev wind turbine system (shown in Fig 1) mainly includes a GCWMG a spare bearing and blades The

Onshore wind turbine main bearing reliability and its

Main bearing failure can become a major contributor to operation and maintenance expenses due to costs associated with crane labor and production loss Data available in the literature indicates that main bearing failure can be observed much earlier than design lives (by a factor of 4) and root cause analysis indicate problems associated with loads exposure to harsh environment inadequate

N Tazi et al Vol 7 No 4 2017 Wear Analysis of Wind

Share of failures in the wind turbine system [3] 2 Data Background 2 1 Bearings in wind turbine components: types materials Bearings are used in various places of the nacelle of a wind turbine Figure 3 shows some main bearings positions in a standard wind turbine nacelle The rotor shaft bearing

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for wind turbines

The Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) method has been used to study the reliability of many different power generation systems This paper now applies that method to a wind turbine (WT) system using a proprietary software reliability analysis tool Comparison is made between the quantitative results of an FMEA and reliability field data from real wind turbine systems and their assemblies

An Improved FMECA Method for Wind Turbines Health

failure mode and effects analysis with available data while improving the economic index from the OM perspective The rest of this paper is organized in l- the fo lowing way In Section 2 a qualitative analysis on wind turbine gearbox failure mode effects main causes and mitigation methods is

Interactive comment on "Fatigue lifetime calculation of

published for application to the double-row 4-point contact ball bearings used in large modern wind turbines Here by "modified" I refer primarily to the calculation of a dynamic equivalent load specific to this application In particular for ISO 16281 in section 2 6 3 it is not clear at what point the methodology departs from the

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis of Repower 5M Wind Turbine

Components of the wind turbine are given in the hardware details section If we want to calculate the reliability of the complete wind turbine assemble than first we have to find the relationship with the each component of wind turbine assembly failure mode of the

Fault diagnosis of wind turbine bearing based on

However wind turbines are prone to various failures due to long-term operation under tough conditions complex alternating loads and variable speeds [5] The bearing is a critical component of a wind turbine and bearing failures form a significant proportion of all failures in wind tur-bines These can lead to outage of the unit and a high

Bearing reliability

Another bearing failure mode caused by inadequate lubrication is surface distress This commonly occurs in wind turbine gearboxes and affects not just the bearings but also the gear teeth The resulting damages impair the bearing function and cause concentrated stresses that can eventually lead to spalling and bearing failure 4 Moisture

Establishing the Failure Modes for Bearings in Wind

In order for wind turbine owners and operators to better manage the drive train lifecycle a sound understanding of failure modes and corrective actions is required This article focuses on the techniques to establish the failure mechanism of wind turbine gearbox bearings and the process of root cause analysis (RCA) to determine the origins

Gearbox Typical Failure Modes Detection and Mitigation

NREL is a national laboratory of the U S Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC Gearbox Typical Failure Modes Detection and Mitigation Methods Shawn Sheng National Renewable Energy Laboratory/National Wind Technology Center

The case for case carburized bearings in wind turbines

Dec 19 2016The data showed that case-carburized bearings were more resistant to actual crack failures than through-hardened bearings Again the actual crack-failure mode is the leading cause of wind turbine gearbox failure We saw that case carburized bearings benefit from the presence of a compressive residual stress which provides increased fatigue

North American Clean Energy

The most common pitch bearing arrangement utilized in wind turbines is the double row 4-point contact bearing also known as an 8-point contact bearing Common Failure Modes In service the pitch bearings rotate in short intermittent sweeps and can spend extended time with little to no rotation