More comprehensive condition monitoring for wind turbines
13/05/2013
The ADAPT 1.7 is the latest addition to the Advanced Distributed Architecture Platform Technology (ADAPT) condition monitoring platform for wind turbines from the Bently Nevada product line of GE Measurement & Control.Featuring shaft vibration monitoring and innovative
ChangeAlert™ change indicator algorithm technology, ADAPT 1.7, which can be retro-fitted or fitted to new ADAPT turbine monitoring systems, now provides a total wind turbine condition monitoring solution throughout the drivetrain and generator.
ADAPT is already well established in thousands of wind turbine installations, improving machine reliability by establishing baseline operating conditions for the drivetrain and helping asset owners to anticipate drivetrain failures and schedule maintenance rather than react to unexpected problems. ADAPT 1.7 now features an additional eddy current probe and keyphasor reference transducer on the main shaft near the main bearing. As a result, the ADAPT system can monitor shaft vibration while specifically searching for tiny shaft cracks, using a proven monitoring technique. The feature is easily set up using a one-click configuration option.
ChangeAlert is a significant innovation for wind turbine condition monitoring and features patent-pending algorithms that use a combination of statistics and digital processing techniques to automatically track changes and detect machine problems to create a ‘true change’ indicator. This minimises conventional errors and the false calls associated with traditional statistical alarming. It also lists turbines and associated components that have changed and may be likely to require further attention. As such, it provides an early warning system for new installations, where alarm thresholds are not yet properly established but it is still important to flag up defects that might cause long-term failure.
Other features of the new ADAPT 1.7 include long synchronous waveform displays, which offer enough bandwidth to detect main bearing defects and eliminate any diagnostic deficiencies when correlating frequency domain spectra and time domain waveforms.
The ADAPT wind condition monitoring solution is an integrated and scalable solution, comprising transducers, monitors and software, which allows intelligent management of wind farm assets. Its software can be integrated with customers’ SCADA systems, allowing a wind farm, or an entire fleet of wind farms, to be monitored from one central location.
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