Quantifying wind turbine (WT) gearbox fatigue life is a critical problem for preventive maintenance when unsolved. This paper proposes a practical approach that uses ten minutes’ average wind speed of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data to quantify a WT gearbox’s gear fatigue life. Wind turbulence impacts on gearbox fatigue are studied thoroughly. Short-term fatigue assessment...

Probabilistic latent component analysis (PLCA) is applied to the problem of gearbox vibration source separation. A model for the probability distribution of gearbox vibration employs a latent variable intended to correspond to a particular vibration source, with the measured vibration at a particular sensor for each source the product of a marginal distribution of vibration by frequency, a marg...

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory presented an investigation of various wind turbine drivetrain condition monitoring (CM) techniques at the 7 International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring held in 2009. The study contained in this report is a continuation of the 2009 paper and focuses on results obtained by various CM techniques from a damaged Gearbox Reliability Collaborative te...

Early identification of faults in railway gearboxes is a challenging task in gearbox fault detection. There are extensive studies, such as patents and papers have been fully developed for processing vibration signals to obtain diagnostic information about gearbox. We have proposed a new technique for detecting faults in the railway gearbox by applying the time frequency parameters and genetic a...

This work discusses the influence of flexibility within the multibody approach for wind-turbine gearbox modeling and validates them, by means of a generic gearbox calculation consisting of one planetary gear stage and two helical stages. First the state-of-the-art rigid multibody modeling with discrete flexibility is discussed. Secondly flexible multibody modeling by means of reduced finite ele...

The integrated design of the drivetrain of a single person ultra light electric vehicle powered by batteries is optimized towards high efficiency and low mass. The drivetrain of each front wheel consists of an outer rotor permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), a gearbox and the power electronics with converter and control print. The complete drivetrain is optimized for the New European Driv...

Condition Monitoring (CM) of wind turbines can greatly reduce the maintenance costs for wind farms, especially for offshore wind farms. A new condition monitoring method for a wind turbine gearbox using temperature trend analysis is proposed. Autoassociative Kernel Regression (AAKR) is used to construct the normal behavior model of the gearbox temperature. With a proper construction of the memo...

The wind industry has had a chronic problem with the reliability of its gearboxes [1], [2]. Experience has shown that premature gearbox failure is a leading maintenance cost driver that can easily consume the profit margin from a wind turbine operation. Condition monitoring is already understood to have potential to mitigate this risk by managing gearbox maintenance through the promises of reli...

This paper presents an integrated design of a drivetrain for a single-person ultra-light electric vehicle (ULEV). To calculate losses and efficiency of the inverter, the permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs) and the gearbox, parameterised analytical models are used. For the gearbox – which has a single gear ratio – the studied parameters are the gear ratio, the number of stages, the num...

Abstract: This paper studies the dynamic response of a wind turbine gearbox under different excitation conditions. The proposed 4 degree-of-freedom (DOF) dynamic model takes into account the key factors such as the time-varying mesh stiffness, bearing stiffness, damping, static transmission error and gear backlash. Both the external excitation due to wind and the internal excitation due to the ...