proof of market potentials and economics of a state of the art condition monitoring technology for wind turbine applications

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£125,000

Aug. 31, 2015

Feb. 29, 2016

A cost-effective Condition Monitoring (CM) technique is essential to raise the availability of
large Wind Turbines (WTs), whether onshore or offshore for the following reasons: The high
construction cost of large WTs increasing the need to improve payback; Large WTs are prone
to failure from extreme environments, such as rain, sand, lighting, tornado, snow and ice, and
also subject to constantly variable load; large WTs breaking down have long downtimes due
to access difficulties; and furthermore, in most large WTs, subassemblies are installed in the
space- limited nacelle on the tower at a height over 60 (m) making replacement difficult.
The use of a reliable CM system will enhance the maintenance and prevent critical WT
subassemblies from being fatally damaged. However, to date, an appropriate CM system,
specifically designed for WT, is not existed. This is an essential need for wind farms because
the monitoring signals collected from a WT are non-stationary and nonlinear, both in time and
frequency, while the conventional CM Systems are notorious in dealing with nonlinear and
non-stationary signals. The inaccurate analysis of WT signals results in frequent spurious
alarms, which cause unnecessary shut down of the WTs, whilst, sometimes not detecting real
faults. This imperfect performance leads to serious reduction in wind farms availability and
hence increases the cost of wind power.
A novel WT CM technology has been developed by Zigoorat Ltd, which is distinguished by
both its excellent capability in processing non-stationary/nonlinear signals and its efficient
computational algorithm. In addition, it has substantially greater fault detection precision as
well as easy installation mechanism compare to existing products in the market.