Jonathan Keller

Gearbox Reliability Collaborative Phase 3 Gearbox 2 Test

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Gearbox Reliability Collaborative (GRC) was established by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2006; its key goal is to understand the root causes of premature gearbox failures and improve their reliability. The GRC uses a combined gearbox testing, modeling, and analysis approach disseminating data and results to the industry and facilitating improvement of gearbox reliability. This test data describes the tests of GRC gearbox 2 in the National Wind Technology Center dynamometer and documents any modifications to the original test plan. It serves as a guide to interpret the publicly released data sets with brief analyses to illustrate the data. TDMS viewer and Solidworks software required to view data files.

Gearbox Reliability Collaborative: Test and Model Investigation of Sun Orbit and Planet Load Share in a Wind Turbine Gearbox

This paper analyzes experimental measurement of the sun pinion orbit during dynamometer testing and describes its relationship to the other measured responses of the planetary stage. The relationships of the sun orbit to component runout, component flexibility, gear coupling alignment, planet load share, and planet position error are investigated. Equations describing the orbit of the sun gear in the test cases are derived. Rigid and flexible multibody models of the full gearbox are investigated and compared to sun and planet measurements. This paper shows that the sun gears path may be influenced by gear coupling responses and gearbox structural flexibilities.