Abstract
The failure of a wind turbine’s main bearing causes very high repair costs, as the entire drivetrain has to be disassembled with the help of an external crane. Just the costs for a crane for an offshore turbine can sum up to 200.000€ per day [1]. In contrast, segmented hydrodynamic plain bearings offer the advantage that individual bearing segments can be replaced on the tower without the use of an external crane, which offers great potential for savings in repair costs. However, this application requires new, innovative plain bearing concepts for which the current design guidelines are not applicable. This paper presents a simulation-based design approach for a plain bearing concept with conical sliding surfaces. Such a simulation-based approach with a multi-objective optimization is necessary, because due to the geometric complexity the manual, iterative design process is not efficient. In this paper, a bearing geometry optimized in terms of load distribution and friction losses was developed by applying this approach.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call