Extending Production Life of Turbine Converters and Generators

Presentation Description: A proactive approach to lifecycle management offering alternative methods to secure operational continuity and extend the life of your turbine powertrain system. Many wind turbine converters and wind generators approaching their end of life can be upgraded for improved reliability and extension of life to continue generation without the need for replacement. Cost mitigation through modernization (HW Retrofit/Upgrade) solutions for converter system can potentially reduce a Cap-ex budget and lower annual repair and maintenance expenses by keeping your existing structure and still having the latest technological innovations inside. With wind generators, extensive data on the causes of failures, show that the stator is the component most likely to fail during this lifecycle phase. By identifying product and component obsolescence, you can improve usability, reliability, performance, and safety with new features from proven technology to help manage the lifecycle of your equipment, improve energy efficiency of your powertrain, enable availability, and have a lower total cost of ownership.

With lifecycle assessments of the powertrain equipment, trends towards failures can be identified, showing which converters or generators will fail first. This is done through screening of the powertrain equipment, maintenance history, fault condition and overall service history. By utilizing this screening analysis, wind farm owners and operators can minimize downtime by selecting the systems most likely to fail first and schedule actions based on that information. This can be planned on a maintenance budget over a period of time to allow for planning of both resources and expenditures and potentially avoiding capex budget constraints.