Time domain-based gear contact fatigue analysis of a wind turbine drivetrain under dynamic conditions

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper presents a general approach to predict the contact fatigue life of the gears in the drive-train system of a wind turbine under dynamic conditions. A simplified predictive pitting model that estimates service lives is presented and validated by comparisons with published experimental evidence. Finally, the predictive model is used to estimate the contact fatigue lives of the sun gear and planetary gears in the drive-train system of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's 750 kW land-based wind turbine based on time domain simulations. The occurrence frequencies of different wind speeds are described by the generalized gamma distribution. The time series of the torques in the main shaft are obtained from a global dynamic response analysis of the wind turbine. The time series of the gear contact forces is obtained from a dynamic analysis of the gearbox using multi-body simulation. The two-parameter Weibull distribution, the three-parameter Weibull distribution, and the generalized-gamma distribution are used to fit the long-term probabilistic distribution of the gear tooth contact pressures. The case study shows the validity of the approach presented in this paper.

Ecomoulding of Composite Wind Turbine Blades Using Green Manufacturing RTM Process

“…This is mainly due to the complexities involved in modeling and simulating the drivetrain with respect to the computation efforts and scale. Recently, Dong et al [14] established and applied a long-term time domain based gear contact fatigue analysis of a wind turbine under dynamic conditions. In the present study, several practical problems of time domain based gear contact fatigue analysis encountered in [14] are described and discussed.…”

“…Recently, Dong et al [14] established and applied a long-term time domain based gear contact fatigue analysis of a wind turbine under dynamic conditions. In the present study, several practical problems of time domain based gear contact fatigue analysis encountered in [14] are described and discussed. These are: (1) the rotation reversal problem of gears under low wind speed conditions, (2) the statistical uncertainty effect due to the time domain simulation and (3) simplified long term contact fatigue analysis of gear teeth under dynamic conditions.…”

Analysis of dynamic meshing characteristic of planetary gear transmission in wind power increasing gearbox

“…Tamarozzi et al [8] analyzed flexible multibody model of two meshing gears by numerical simulation. Dong et al [9] proposed a new method to study the contact fatigue life of gear-bearing system of a wind turbine. Li et al [10] studied the influence of addendum on bending strength and tooth contact strength of spur gears.…”

“…Lumped parameter model and the finite element analysis (FEA) just for teeth were adopted in references [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] to analyze the dynamic characteristics of meshing contact transmission with parallel axis. However, the FEA just for teeth is not fully conformed to actual condition of planetary gear transmission in engineering application, leading to that the actual condition cannot be reflected in full scale.…”

Reliability Analysis of Fatigue Failure of Cast Components for Wind Turbines

“…Several methods have been investigated, such as vibration and acoustic emissions [5] and local mean decomposition [6]. Some studies on probabilistic modeling of failures in wind turbine drivetrain components have been carried out, e.g., [7,8] but without a detailed stochastic modeling of the uncertainties related to the parameters in the limit state equations modeling each failure mode. This paper focuses on probabilistic models and the stochastic modeling of fatigue lives in the wind turbine drivetrain using structural reliability methods, see [9], allowing a rational modeling of all uncertainties.…”