Prediction of the Fatigue Life for Large Wind Turbine Gearbox

Abstract

Wind turbine gearbox is the key component. Because of alternating loads caused by gear engagement, variations of wind speed and fluctuation of load, it is prone to get fatigue damage, which lead to the high failure rate and low life. In this paper, obtaining the stress time histories through multi-body dynamics simulation, then base on the simulation data, statistical processing load time histories by used rain flow counting method, the last is that estimating fatigue life of components, combined with P-S-N curves of parts material and linear cumulative damage law. The fatigue life prediction of each component in gearbox would be implemented by matlab programming. Through the fatigue analysis of a megawatt-class wind turbine gearbox transmission chain, the design was verified feasibility, but not economic, and it show that this method has certain reference value and potential for improvement.