ONYX InSight and 8.2 Monitoring partner on wind technology

The market provides a significant opportunity for digitalisation practices; a large proportion of German wind turbines currently lack either a factory-fitted or aftermarket condition monitoring system (CMS) that would help owners and operators to reduce their operational and maintenance (O&M) costs and increase productivity.

Cost effective solutions for ageing fleets

Nearly 85% of operational wind turbines in Germany are more than five years old, and so not covered by manufacturer warranties. Until recently, operators struggled to justify the high cost of installing and running CMS hardware on older turbines against the turbines’ lifetime value, even when accounting for savings in repairs and improved availability and capacity factors. However, by using advanced sensing technology to reduce the cost of retrofitting monitoring hardware to aging wind energy assets, ONYX InSight has transformed the return on investment. This applies to both geared and direct drive wind turbines.

As permitting restrictions and a troubled transition to a merchant market continue to hamper new builds, wind farm owners and operators in Germany are increasingly looking to maximise revenue and minimise operations and maintenance costs for their existing assets.

ecoCMS provides an effective and economical aftermarket turbine monitoring solution. This is particularly the case on the market’s workhorse sub-2MW turbines – where previous CMS hardware options have not been considered cost-effective.

Benefits for direct drive and gearbox systems

The German market has a mix of turbines using direct drive and gearbox technology. Although direct drive turbines contain fewer moving parts than their gearbox equivalent, vibration monitoring improves the accuracy of fault detection and prediction in both systems. Failures can be considerably costlier with direct drive fleets due to the larger size and more critical role of components.

Predictive maintenance is essential across both technologies if wind farm operators are to extract maximum value over the lifecycle of their turbines. Collecting and analysing vibration data is one of the most effective approaches available to asset owners and ONYX InSight’s study shows that operators with better wind turbine data analytics save up to 17% on their OPEX costs. Crucially, combining multiple data streams, such as vibration, oil and temperature, improves diagnostic accuracy – these data sets can all be collected via ecoCMS advanced sensing technology.

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Read the article online at: https://www.energyglobal.com/wind/14102020/onyx-insight-and-82-monitoring-partner-on-wind-technology/