SKF’s WindCon Drives Operations and Maintenance Best Practices

SKF Reliability Systems recently gave ARC a briefing on its WindCon condition monitoring systems for Wind Energy assets, from individual wind turbines to entire wind farms. WindCon offers a solution to the unique challenges facing the wind energy industry, giving operators the means to assess the performance of remote, difficult to maintain assets, and the tools they need to optimize their maintenance practices to maintain availability and reduce their costs. The capabilities of SKF WindCon also fit neatly within ARC’s Design/Operate/Maintain plant lifecycle model.


Wind Energy Industry Activity has Quadrupled
While a relatively small energy provider compared to fossil fuels, the wind energy industry has seen enormous growth in recent years, more than quadrupling its capacity between 2000 and 2006. Clearly, times are good for wind energy operators and manufacturers of heavy equipment, such as turbines, generators, and gearboxes used in windmills. One side effect of this growth is that as manufacturers struggle to keep up with orders, the lead time for delivery of spare parts has lengthened significantly. As a result, wind farm operators need to have timely, accurate information about the status of assets to help them make optimal decisions about when—or whether—to repair or replace key components.


High Flying Assets Pose Significant Operational and Maintenance Challenges
Wind energy is typified by remote assets that operate under harsh conditions, particularly in offshore wind farms. This reliance on distributed, far flung production assets poses several challenges to wind energy operators. The pressures to keep wind turbines up and running have multiplied as demand for wind energy as an alternative to expensive fossil fuels has increased, and competition between wind energy providers has intensified. Wind farm operators must be able to manage wide-area, large-scale production networks centrally and in real time in order to balance production to comply with capacity constraints of the available electrical grid. The variability in wind requires that wind turbines be available and operational when wind strength is sufficient to generate power. They need tools to help them to detect and correct degradations in equipment performance before key wind turbine parts fail and jeopardize production.

Maintenance staffs are charged with improving the reliability of wind energy assets and reducing operator intervention and unplanned downtime. Maintaining wind turbines is no small task, however. With limited personnel available to perform maintenance, manual inspection of the rotating assets of wind turbines, which are located up to 50 meters off the ground, is both labor and cost intensive. In addition, periodic inspections may reveal faults, but provide only a single data point, which is inadequate in determining how performance will degrade over time, and when corrective action or replacement are necessary. With longer delivery lead times for spare components, operators need reliable estimates of how long a damaged wind turbine can be run without repairs, and when they should order replacement equipment.

Planned maintenance is expensive enough, but the costs of unplanned downtime can be staggering. In addition to lost production, some estimates put the cost of repairs during breakdowns at three times that of scheduled maintenance procedures. Clearly, wind farm operators can benefit by migrating from a reactive maintenance strategy, where the cost of lost production, labor, equipment, and spare parts all come at a premium, to a proactive, predictive maintenance approach that allows them to repair their assets at the most opportune time, while minimizing the impact on production and maintenance costs.

SKF WindCon Forms Basis for Proactive Maintenance Strategies
The basis for a successful proactive maintenance program is reliable, continuous condition monitoring of key production assets. With SKF’s WindCon 2.0 condition monitoring software, operators can keep tabs on the performance of their wind turbines remotely, in real time. Using data collected from vibration sensors mounted on the main shaft bearings, drive train gearbox, and the generator of each turbine, WindCon can automatically detect excess vibration and declines in performance that can give operators advance notification of faults before they lead to major breakdowns. This helps operators to make informed decisions about when to schedule necessary repairs, and more flexibility in ordering necessary replacement equipment. With its reliable maintenance forecasting tools, WindCon can help users to maximize the overall uptime of their wind turbines, reduce operations and maintenance costs, and shift maintenance from a reactive to a proactive, predictive-based model.

Every wind turbine is fitted with SKF’s Intelligent Monitoring Unit (iMU). The iMU continuously collects data from accelerometers, displacement sensors, temperature probes or other transducers (up to16 channels). Analyses are made locally, alarms checked, data stored, and key data is transmitted to operator control room, which can be located anywhere convenient to the wind turbine operator. WindCon software monitors the data from the iMUs around the clock. This central unit can be connected to several wind turbines via a TCP/IP network. Whenever questions concerning the monitored wind turbines arise, external specialists, including technicians from wind turbine manufacturers or an expert from SKF, can access the system via a remote monitoring link.

The web-based version of WindCon software allows wind farm operators to use SKF’s WebCon data warehousing and web hosting services. With WebCon, authorized personnel can access data from individual wind turbines or several wind farms via the web. Data and analysis are presented in a straightforward user interface, and wind farm personnel do not need special training to interpret or respond to evolving maintenance issues.

Remote, real-time condition monitoring delivers results. Installed on the gearbox of a 600kW turbine on a British wind farm, WindCon quickly detected a known fault, and after collecting several data points, operators were able to confirm that the damage was not worsening over the near term. With this knowledge, they were able to postpone replacing the gearbox until lower wind conditions arose on the farm, and kept the turbine in operation. After nearly a year, WindCon detected a marked increase in vibration, and operators scheduled the turbine for maintenance. By this time, a spare gearbox was available, and because the outage was planned, operators were able to control their personnel costs and hire a heavy-lift crane at lower rates. In addition, they optimized their use of capital by keeping the turbine in operation as long as they possibly could.

SKF’s WindCon condition monitoring system aligns well with ARC’s Design, Operate, Maintain (DOM) enterprise interoperability framework, and can help wind farm operators as they strive to improve equipment reliability, increase productivity, and to make informed decisions about when to take wind turbines offline for maintenance. WindCon helps users to shift maintenance from an expensive, reactive process to a proactive, predictive-based model that uses maintenance resources more efficiently. Asset health and performance information can also have important implications for the design of future wind turbines. The maintenance data collected by WindCon will be useful to manufacturers of wind turbine components. It gives them a window into the performance of their equipment in the field, and a feedback loop that can help them to fine tune the design of their products to make them more resistant to common failures and give them a longer operational lifespan. Also the statistical data provided by WindCon empower operators with information to run wind turbines more efficiently reducing equipment stress to improve wind turbine uptime.

SKF’s WindCon clearly demonstrates the benefits of real-time condition monitoring for remote assets like wind turbines. It leverages SKF’s traditional strengths in bearings and rotating equipment to help users maximize uptime and reduce operational and maintenance costs. WindCon can be an important tool for managing key production assets across their entire lifecycle. While SKF has become a strong supplier of reliability-centered maintenance and condition monitoring, it is still best known for its bearings, rather than its asset management services. However, SKF makes a strong case for adopting proactive maintenance strategies enabled by its remote condition monitoring products, and offers a compelling value proposition to wind farm operators who want to optimize their production and maintenance practices.

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