From suffering in the tower top
Dr.-Ing. Christoph Heilmann, Head of Research and Development at Green Wind Engineering, is no desk jockey. He also climbs onto the roof of the wind turbines himself: „It is great what our camera-based measurements deliver. Tracking displacements ofsome millimetres at 100+ m distance. I was in the nacelle during this emergency-stop(from pitch system error) and felt what ALL the components in the tower top sufferedduring this sudden “nacelle earth quake” of 2+ m when the thrust collapses duringstorm.
Wind Turbines are “fatigue machines” due to the operating loads AND they experienceextreme loads, like this e-stop, which also contribute to lifetime consumption.
For turbines with larger rotor imbalance these e-stops from vibration safety limits aremore frequent. We were at imbalanced turbines shutting down regularily for higherwinds. Due to installation issues, the real rotor imbalance was far off the numbers in theblade set protocol.
After balancing they ran smoothly through the storms giving the expected yield.
A very experienced, honest wind energy engineer told me: “We cannot prevent all manufacturing/installation/O&M issues and all human errors. Let’s be so wise to detectand remove them as quickly as possible.”
That is our aim, too. Don’t wait too long andgive us a call!
