Mea­sure­ments on the wind tur­bine trans­mis­sion

Prob­lems: Trans­mis­sion error, trans­mis­sion error, emis­sions of struc­ture-borne noise and noise, mechan­i­cal wear on com­po­nents.

Goal: Opti­mal design of wind pow­er gear­box­es, reduc­tion of struc­ture-borne noise emis­sions

Every gear­box and the indi­vid­ual parts installed in it are sub­ject to man­u­fac­tur­ing tol­er­ances, which vary in tight­ness depend­ing on the intend­ed use and loca­tion of the entire assem­bly. Due to these man­u­fac­tur­ing tol­er­ances in com­bi­na­tion with tem­per­a­ture and load-depen­dent com­po­nent elas­tic­i­ties as well as assem­bly influ­ences, the trans­mis­sion func­tion of the rotary motion and torque devi­ates from the ide­al trans­mis­sion func­tion. This phe­nom­e­non is also known as trans­mis­sion error (TE). The more com­plex a gear unit is, i.e. the more gear stages it has, includ­ing shafts, gears and bear­ings, the greater the sum of the indi­vid­ual trans­mis­sion errors. The con­se­quences of trans­mis­sion errors are man­i­fest­ed by increased macro­scop­ic and micro­scop­ic wear on the com­po­nents and com­po­nent sur­faces. Fur­ther­more, they are acousti­cal­ly per­cep­ti­ble to humans through the emis­sion of struc­ture-borne sound and noise. There­fore, a mea­sure­ment of the trans­mis­sion error is nec­es­sary. This ensures that the error of each indi­vid­ual gear stage can be quan­ti­fied.

Con­se­quent­ly, design-relat­ed influ­ences, which dif­fer great­ly between spur or plan­e­tary gears, for exam­ple, as well as gear mesh­ing errors can be ana­lyzed using suit­able mea­sure­ment tech­nol­o­gy. Pow­er­ful soft­ware can be used to gen­er­ate order and fre­quen­cy spec­tra in two and three dimen­sions and to find cor­re­la­tions between trans­mis­sion errors and struc­ture-borne noise emis­sions. To col­lect mea­sure­ment data, high-res­o­lu­tion incre­men­tal sen­sors are applied to the trans­mis­sion input and out­put shafts. Depend­ing on the shaft diam­e­ter, dif­fer­ent sen­sor types are avail­able for this pur­pose, such as one-piece hol­low shaft encoders or a two-piece sen­sor sys­tem with a sep­a­rate sen­sor head and a mag­net­ic tape that spans the shaft. In par­al­lel with the speed mea­sure­ment, the struc­ture-borne noise is mea­sured by means of accel­er­a­tion sen­sors at var­i­ous points in the gear unit.

The record­ed mea­sured val­ues are eval­u­at­ed in the time and spec­tral domain.

Fur­ther­more ROTEC ENGI­NEER­ING pro­vides you with sup­port and tech­ni­cal engi­neer­ing know-how for prob­lems relat­ed to vibra­tion analy­sis of engines, trans­mis­sions and dri­ve trains. With our know-how, we make a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to your prod­uct in the areas of tim­ing gear val­i­da­tion, valve train opti­miza­tion, clutch design, trans­mis­sion errors (TE), trans­mis­sion opti­miza­tion, oil sup­ply opti­miza­tion, pow­er­train mea­sure­ment and opti­miza­tion, cur­rent and volt­age analy­sis, and the appli­ca­tion of mea­sure­ment tech­nol­o­gy.