The standard for wind turbines being built by the ever-innovating wind industry in utility-scale installations has changed from 1.5 megawatts to 2.5 megawatts in the last year. That means that each time a tower goes up, the standard machine will now generate enough electricity for 240 more homes than it did in 2008.
But the wind industry is on the verge an even bigger shift, a step change ahead in power, efficiency and cost. Those 2.5-megawatt turbines still have traditional gearing mechanisms. Wind's innovators want to free turbine motors from the burden of gears with the simplicity of direct drive.
"In a gear-driven system, you have three stages of gears, and each stage has multiple bearings and a structure to house all of these gears," Sandy Butterfield, the former Chief Engineer of the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) said at a recent wind industry conference. "We want to take a 15 RPM input shaft and spin it up to 1800 RPMs on the high speed side...[an] almost 100-to-1 ratio that requires multiple stages of gears, so a very complicated, high-precision machining, lots of close tolerances."
To read the full, original article click on this link: Wind Turbines, The Next Generation : Greentech Media
Author: Herman K. Trabish
