Abstract
The wind industry has seen tremendous growth during the past two decades, with the global cumulative installation capacity reaching more than 650 gigawatts by the end of 2019. Despite performance and reliability improvements of utility-scale wind turbines over the years, the industry still experiences premature component failures, leading to increased operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. Among various turbine components, gearboxes—and, more broadly, drivetrains—have shown to be costly to maintain throughout the design life of a wind turbine. The problem of premature component failure is industry wide. As early as 2007, the US Department of Energy (DOE) started to address this challenge through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) reliability initiative that first focused on gearboxes and more recently expanded to entire drivetrains. The wind turbine drivetrain condition monitoring and wind plant O&M research that is the subject of this paper is part of the NREL initiative and includes a few research and development (R&D) activities conducted during the 2010s. These activities included technology evaluation during the first few years; novel monitoring technique investigation (specifically, compact filter analysis) during the middle years; and data and physics domain modeling for fault detection and prediction in recent years. A high-level summary of these activities is provided in this paper along with some key observations from each activity. Most of the work discussed has been published and can be referred to for more information. They reflect the expected evolution of wind turbine condition monitoring and O&M in the US market—primarily, a land-based perspective. In addition, we have identified several R&D opportunities that can be picked up by the research community to help industry advance in related areas, making wind power more cost competitive in the future.
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Acknowledgements
Contributions to the NREL condition monitoring and wind plant O&M research by other team members—especially Dr. Yi Guo, Lindy Williams, and Dr. Jon Keller—are greatly appreciated. Without the support from partners in both academia and industry, the reported work would not have been possible. This work was authored by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the US Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. Funding was provided by the US Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Wind Energy Technologies Office. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the US Government. The US Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.
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Sheng, S. NREL’s Wind Turbine Drivetrain Condition Monitoring and Wind Plant Operation and Maintenance Research During the 2010s: A US Land-Based Perspective. Acoust Aust 49, 239–249 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40857-021-00223-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40857-021-00223-8