RNRG has announced recently that the site-wide installation of its “TurbinePhD” condition monitoring systems has been completed at the 21 MW Grant County Wind Farm in Minnesota, USA.Originally constructed in 2010 and owned by Aspenall Energies, the project is composed of ten 2.1MW Suzlon S88 wind turbines. Suzlon, who delivers the long term service agreement for operations and maintenance, has installed the CMS systems across the entire site and will perform the ensuing monitoring work.
TurbinePhD will enable Suzlon to execute elements of predictive maintenance at Grant County, to fix or replace components at the right time, thus avoiding down time due to unexpected major component failures. RNRG, who designs and manufactures TurbinePhD, will provide ongoing technical support to Suzlon and Aspenall.
John Ugland, RNRG Technical Account Manager, commented: “It’s a remote site, located at a two hour drive from the Suzlon service center, and depending on weather conditions, it can be completely inaccessible for major servicing. That’s why having TurbinePhD in place is so important. It will offer the means to deliver the proactive maintenance planning that is needed. We are thankful to Suzlon for the trust they placed in us with this first complete collaborative project, and we very much look forward to strengthening our long term relationship with them.”
The TurbinePhD installed at Grant County is an automated vibration-based solution designed to equip operators with a cost-effective and easy-to-use drivetrain condition monitoring system. It provides timely diagnosis of asset health, before secondary damage is caused, so that the corrective action required is less expensive than running the asset to failure.What’s more, TurbinePhD’s powerful automated analysis classifies the health of all turbine drivetrain components, so users don’t have to be vibration experts to get actionable information. Improved alert management allows users to handle all alerts in one place and track who acknowledges and clears issues. The fleet view allows operators to assess the health of all wind farms at a glance, and graphical health alerts clearly highlight those that need attention. At the wind farm level, users can see which turbines have new alerts or view and download charts of the most critical faults on the farm.
Interestingly, the Grant County project’s wind resource was also originally measured using RNRG’s met masts and instrumentation. “This is a nice example of RNRG’s unique ability to support wind projects at all phases of development and operations”, concluded Ugland.
