proof of market potentials and economics of a state of the art condition monitoring technology for wind turbine applications

Completed

Renewable Energy Sources(Wind Energy)

Applied Research and Development

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Project Contact
Zigoorat Limited

Smart - Proof of Market

Innovate UK

01 September 2015

29 February 2016

6 months

£25,000

East of England

Competition Call: 1503_SmartRnd1_PoM - Smart Proof of Market. Activity Proof of Market Rd1

Project Contact, Zigoorat Limited

A cost-effective Condition Monitoring (CM) technique is essential to raise the availability of large Wind Turbines (WTs), whether onshore or offshore for the following reasons: The high construction cost of large WTs increasing the need to improve payback; Large WTs are prone to failure from extreme environments, such as rain, sand, lighting, tornado, snow and ice, and also subject to constantly variable load; large WTs breaking down have long downtimes due to access difficulties; and furthermore, in most large WTs, subassemblies are installed in the space- limited nacelle on the tower at a height over 60 (m) making replacement difficult. The use of a reliable CM system will enhance the maintenance and prevent critical WT subassemblies from being fatally damaged. However, to date, an appropriate CM system, specifically designed for WT, is not existed. This is an essential need for wind farms because the monitoring signals collected from a WT are non-stationary and nonlinear, both in time and frequency, while the conventional CM Systems are notorious in dealing with nonlinear and non-stationary signals. The inaccurate analysis of WT signals results in frequent spurious alarms, which cause unnecessary shut down of the WTs, whilst, sometimes not detecting real faults. This imperfect performance leads to serious reduction in wind farms availability and hence increases the cost of wind power. A novel WT CM technology has been developed by Zigoorat Ltd, which is distinguished by both its excellent capability in processing non-stationary/nonlinear signals and its efficient computational algorithm. In addition, it has substantially greater fault detection precision as well as easy installation mechanism compare to existing products in the market.

13/02/18