1.5 MWatt Wind Turbine Gearbox

Overview

Data Acquisition and Control for High Accelerated Life Test for a major manufacturer of wind turbine power generation equipment.
This gear unit was specifically for a 1.5 Megawatt generator which under accelerated loads exceeded 900,000 Lb-Ft of torque with transient loads exceeding 1,900,000 Lb-Ft of torque.
This test employed re-circulated power so that the total realized energy cost was less than 15% of the overall power.
Customer inverters and drive motors were used to deliver the mechanical load to the gear units

Unique Challenges

Consulting with the customer we suggested the use of re-circulating power to minimize operating costs.
In order to minimize the installation cost we suggested they use their own inverters and drive motors.
We had to develop custom hexadecimal drivers to interface with the customer’s inverter system controller.
The customer wanted to further reduce cost by using their own wiring personnel which drove us to more defined point-to-point drawings and wiring sheets.