Wind turbines are nowadays one of the most promising energy sources. Every year, the amount of energy produced from the wind grows steadily. Investors demand turbine manufacturers to produce bigger, more efficient and robust units. These requirements resulted in fast development of condition-monitoring methods. However, significant sizes and varying operational conditions can make diagnostics of the wind turbines very challenging.
The paper shows the case study of a wind turbine that had suffered a serious rolling element bearing (REB) fault. The authors compare several methods for early detection of symptoms of the failure. The paper compares standard methods based on spectral analysis and a number of novel methods based on narrowband envelope analysis, kurtosis and cyclostationarity approach.
The very important problem of proper configuration of the methods is addressed as well. It is well known that every method requires setting of several parameters. In the industrial practice, configuration should be as standard and simple as possible. The paper discusses configuration parameters of investigated methods and their sensitivity to configuration uncertainties
In recent times, the concept of hard turning has gained awareness in metal cutting as it can apparently replace the traditional process cycle of turning, heat treating, and finish grinding for assembly of hard, wear-resistant steel parts. The major apprehension in hard turning is the tool vibration, which affects the surface finish of the work piece, has to be controlled and monitored. In order to control tool vibration in metal cutting, a magnetorheological fluid damper which has received great attention in suppressing tool vibration was developed and used. Also an attempt has been made in this study to monitor tool vibration using the skewness and kurtosis parameters of acoustic emission (AE) signal for the tool holder with and without magnetorheological damper. Cutting experiments were conducted to arrive at a set of operating parameters that can offer better damping characteristics to minimize tool vibration during turning of AISI4340 steel of 46 HRC using hard metal insert with sculptured rake face. From the results, it was observed that the presence of magnetorheological damper during hard turning reduces tool vibration and there exist a strong relationship between tool vibration and acoustic emission (AERMS) signals to monitor tool condition. This work provides momentous understanding on the usage of magnetorheological damper and AE sensor to control and monitor the tool condition during turning of hardened AISI4340 steel.
Circuit Breakers (CBs) play an important role in ensuring the safe operation of protection systems. Condition Monitoring (CM) devices are widely implemented to extend lifetime, and to improve the maintenance quality. The present paper proposes a cost-based prioritization approach for CBs in a network equipped withCMdevices. To this end, a mathematical formulation is developed for the categorization and modeling of equipment failures based on their severity. This formulation quantifies the effect of the CM devices on the outage rate of the equipment. The reliability parameters of the substations 400/132/20 KV, including the failure rate, λ, average repair time, r, average outage time, U, substations, in two status of without CM and with CM of the CBs are calculated. These parameters are calculated implementing a minimal cut-set method. The outage rate of equipment with and without the CM devices is used to determine the effect of the CM devices on the reliability of the network. Finally, the prioritization of substations to install theCMdevices on the CBs has been investigated in terms of the Expected Energy Not Supplied (EENS) and costs of CM. To verify the effectiveness and applicability of the method, the proposed approach is applied to the CBs in the power transmission network in the Khorasan Regional Electricity Company (KREC) in Iran.
The condition monitoring techniques like acoustic emission, vibration analysis, and infrared thermography, used for the failure diagnosis of bearings, require longer processing time, as they have to perform acoustical measurement followed by signal processing and further analysis using special software. However, for any bearing, its period of usage can be easily determined within an hour, by measuring the bearing sound, using sound level meter (SLM). In this paper the acoustical analysis of the spindle bearing of a radial drilling machine was performed using SLM, by measuring the sound pressure level of the bearing in decibels, for different frequencies, while muting all the other noises. Then using an experimental set up, two database readings were taken, one for new bearing and the other for completely damaged bearing, both are SKF6207, which itself is the spindle bearing. From these three sets of sound pressure level readings, the period of usage of the spindle bearing, was calculated using an interpolation equation, by substituting the life of the bearing from the manufacturer’s catalogue. Therefore, for any machine with a SKF6207 bearing, its usage time can be estimated using the database readings and one measurement on that machine, all with the same speed.
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