6 Search Results

Pitch bearings, main bearings, and gearboxes in conventional wind turbine drivetrains often do not meet their 20-year minimum specified lifetime, resulting in turbine downtime as well as expensive, time-consuming repairs or replacements. The dominant failure modes of the drivetrain components and the conditions that lead to their failure are not fully accounted for during product design or routinely modeled for life management. Drivetrain reliability improvements and O&M cost reductions remain top priorities for both land-based and offshore wind turbines, especially as wind turbines continue to be deployed in increasingly remote and offshore locations, continue to increase in size, and aremore » becoming expected to be in service beyond their original design life, all of which correspond to an increase in the impact of any reliability issues on O&M costs. This presentation summarizes the most recent activities by NREL and ANL on drivetrain reliability.« less

Pitch bearings, main bearings, and gearboxes in conventional wind turbine drivetrains often do not meet their 20-year minimum specified lifetime, resulting in turbine downtime as well as expensive, time-consuming repairs or replacements. The dominant failure modes of the drivetrain components and the conditions that lead to their failure are not fully accounted for during product design or routinely modeled for life management. Drivetrain reliability improvements and O&M cost reductions remain top priorities for both land-based and offshore wind turbines, especially as wind turbines continue to be deployed in increasingly remote and offshore locations, continue to increase in size, and aremore » becoming expected to be in service beyond their original design life, all of which correspond to an increase in the impact of any reliability issues on O&M costs. This presentation summarizes the most recent activities by NREL and ANL on drivetrain reliability.« less

The Drivetrain Reliability Collaborative holds annual meetings convened by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the U.S. Department of Energy to bring researchers and stakeholders throughout the wind turbine drivetrain supply, operations, and sustainment chain together to explore the state of the art in mechanical system reliability and operations and maintenance challenges that if solved could have significant benefits. Identification of these research and development opportunities are a prime focus of the meetings and are summarized in this report.

Additive manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize the production of metallic components as it yields near net shape parts with complex geometries and minimizes waste. At the present day, additively manufactured components face qualification and certification challenges due to the difficulty in controlling defects. This has driven a significant research effort aimed at better understanding and improving processing controls – yielding a plethora of in-situ measurements aimed at correlating defects with material quality metrics of interest. In this work, we develop machine-learning methods to learn correlations between thermal history and subsurface porosity for a variety of print conditions in lasermore » powder bed fusion. Un-normalized surface temperatures (in the form of black-body radiances) are obtained using high-speed infrared imaging and porosity formation is observed in the sample cross-section through synchrotron x-ray imaging. To demonstrate the predictive power of these features, we present four statistical machine-learning models that correlate temperature histories to subsurface porosity formation in laser fused Ti-6Al4V powder.« less

The growing demands for renewable energy production have recently resulted in a significant increase in wind plant installation. Field data from these plants show that wind turbines suffer from costly repair, maintenance and high failure rates. Often times the reliability issues are linked with tribological components used in wind turbine drivetrains. The primary failure modes in bearings and gears are associated with micropitting, wear, brinelling, scuffing, smearing and macropitting all of which occur at or near the surface. Accordingly, a variety of surface engineering approaches are currently being considered to alter the near surface properties of such bearings and gearsmore » to prevent these tribological failures. In the present work, we have evaluated the tribological performance of compliant highly hydrogenated diamond like carbon coating developed at Argonne National Laboratory, under mixed rolling/sliding contact conditions for wind turbine drivetrain components. The coating was deposited on AISI 52100 steel specimens using a magnetron sputter deposition system. The experiments were performed on a PCS Micro-Pitting-Rig (MPR) with four material pairs at 1.79 GPa contact stress, 40% slide to roll ratio and in polyalphaolefin (PAO4) basestock oil (to ensure extreme boundary conditions). The post-test analysis was performed using optical microscopy, surface profilometry, and Raman spectroscopy. The results obtained show a potential for these coatings in sliding/rolling contact applications as no failures were observed with coated specimens even after 100 million cycles compared to uncoated pair in which they failed after 32 million cycles, under the given test conditions.« less