Reliability is vital in the growth of the wind industry, especially offshore, and to realise the UK's targets for 2020. Wind Technologies has developed a novel and patent-pending condition monitoring technology, ReliaWind, with highly enhanced precision and wider range of fault prediction for wind turbine drivetrains, enabling more than 30% reduction in maintenance cost of offshore wind farms.
The unique feature of ReliaWind is utilising both mechanical and electrical measurements, fed into an advanced self-learning algorithm, which enables accurate prediction of various faults in the gearbox, generator and bearings.
The project aims to assess the feasibility of ReliaWind technology, proven on a small-scale laboratory test rig, for large offshore wind turbines by assessing its performance in a real 20 kW wind turbine and studying its fault prediction capability for commonly used drivetrain architectures in offshore turbines.