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View on Renewables
NREL Gearbox Study Aims to
Grease Wind Power’s Future
By Fort Felker, Director, National Wind Technology Center, NREL
W
ind turbines appear so
simple—tall white senti-
nels cranking gracefully
on the horizon. But up close, a wind
turbine is an industrial workhorse.
Inside the nacelle hundreds of feet off
the ground, hot metal gears strain as
shifting winds pull and twist the long
flexible blades. Sometimes, something
has to give under such strain and the turbine gearbox has been
an occasional culprit.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL)
National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) has embarked on
the task of determining why some gearboxes tend to fail too
soon—sometimes within a few years of installation. That’s a
problem because wind turbines are expected to operate for 20
years. Early equipment failure, especially in turbine gearboxes,
reduces power production and drives up wind power costs just
as the industry captures a greater share of U.S. generating
capacity. The NWTC is working to improve gearbox reliability
by bringing together the parties involved in the gearbox-design
process to achieve the common goal of improving the lifetime
of gearboxes. This is being accomplished through the Gearbox
Reliability Collaborative (GRC).
Since gearboxes are one of the most expensive components of
the wind turbine system, the higher-than-expected failure rates
are adding to the cost of wind energy. The future uncertainty
of gearbox life expectancy is contributing to wind turbine price
escalation, since increased warranty reserves are required to
cover the risk of premature gearbox failure. Further, owners
and operators build contingencies into the project’s revenue
and income projections to account for problems that may
show up after the warranty expires. To help reduce the cost of
energy, an increase in long-term gearbox reliability needs to be
demonstrated.
The collaborative extensively tests instrumented gearboxes
to identify weaknesses in current design approaches and aims to
point out ways to improve initial designs and retrofit packages.
12 • POWER ENGINEERING APRIL 2010
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The project identifies equipment failures that are common
throughout the industry and targets deficiencies in the design
process that are contributing to these problems. NREL has
overcome intellectual property concerns by running tests on
representative wind turbine configurations and parts, but not
replicating any specific manufacturer’s wind turbine model.
Focusing on design is especially important because the
expanding wind industry is trying to rapidly meet market
demand for new and larger-capacity turbines. Designers and
manufacturers are all following very stringent design-quality
tolerances.
Yet the problems persist. This implies the design standards
are missing some critical loads or conditions that are unique to
wind turbines, or that key assumptions in the design and analysis
process are flawed. Without identifying the fundamental issues
behind previous failures, the same problems could fi nd their
way into new generations of turbines.
Here are some observations on the basic problem:
•Most of the problems with the current fleet of gearboxes are
widespread in nature, meaning that the problems are not
specific to a single manufacturer or turbine model. Over the
years, most wind turbine gearbox designs have converged
to a similar architecture with only a few exceptions.
• The preponderance of gearbox failures suggests that poor
adherence to accepted gear industry practices, or poor
workmanship, are not the primary cause of failures.
• Most gearbox failures do not begin as gear failures or gear-
tooth design deficiencies. The observed failures appear to
initiate at several specific bearing locations, which may
later advance into the gear teeth as bearing debris and
excess clearances cause surface wear and misalignments.
The problems that manifested themselves in the earlier 500
kW to 1,000 kW sizes five to 10 years ago still exist in many
of the larger 1 to 2 MW gearboxes being built today with the
same architecture. As such, it is likely that lessons learned in
solving problems at today’s scale can be applied directly to
future wind turbines at a larger scale, but with less cost.
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