Save 87% on a major maintenance event
Imagine being able to make informed decisions about your maintenance practices that could result in an O&M cost savings equal to 87% on a major wind turbine component maintenance event. How would that impact your business?
In a wind turbine gearbox, a damaged bearing or gear tooth left undetected and untreated can lead to secondary and even catastrophic damage to that gearbox. This can lead to a costly gearbox exchange by unplanned maintenance. The cost of parts and the use of a crane alone is roughly $250,000 for a 1.5MW turbine. Once you add in the loss of revenue from 10 days of inoperability and the cost of labor, that one event on a single turbine can cost upwards of $300,000.
With advanced prognostics, an operator can now identify specific bearing and gear failures far in advance of sensor detection. This allows the operator to plan and schedule a minor component uptower repair, which costs a fraction of a full gearbox exchange. Replacing the damaged part before secondary failures occur eliminates the $100,000 crane cost and reduces the inoperability of the turbine from 10 days to 3 days. The result is a cost savings of as much as 87% for this type of maintenance event. The turbine also benefits from gearbox life extension, because secondary damage was prevented.
In our wind division, Sentient Science’s main goals are to reduce the operator’s operational expenditures and maximize the customer’s profit. We do this by specializing in advanced prognostics using a material science-based software to identify early crack initiation in the specific bearing location and project the meantime to observable damage. This insight gives customers the timetable of when actions would need to be taken to do preventative maintenance as opposed to corrective maintenance. Our DigitalClone Live technology analyzes the component life expectancy and pulls from the SCADA feed to continuously refresh and adapt the DigitalTwin for accurate ongoing predictions. The result is continuous monitoring of the turbine gearbox, main bearings, and other major systems and components.