Design and Analysis of Wind Turbine Gearbox Test Rig

Energy associated with high speed wind in certain regions will be exploited to generate electrical power with the aid of wind turbines. Primary drawback of wind turbine is generation of electrical power with low speed and high torque. But this needs to be converted to high speed and low torque power. Gear system will be used in wind turbine to do so. If any functional problem arises with this gear system it needs to be rectified. As the gear system will be installed at elevated height in wind turbine its maintenance becomes tedious. Hence predictive maintenance is most preferred than general maintenance in case of gear system of wind turbine. For carrying out predictive maintenance user should have idea about useful life of gear system. So far no practical system is available which can evaluate the useful life of gear system. Hence this project is taken up to design a system which can evaluate the useful life of gear system of wind turbine. To begin with configuration having all subsystems will be identified. Then all the subsystems designed to arrive at their dimensions. All the dimensional models are transformed to solid model using CATIA V5. Structural analysis is carried out using ANSYS software in order to ascertain the design adequacy.