SKF helps wind farms stay up down under

SKF has supplied its WindCon Condition Monitoring system to the Cathedral Rocks Windfarm in South Australia, to optimise the schedule and efficiency of maintenance operations

SKF has supplied its WindCon Condition Monitoring system to the Cathedral Rocks Windfarm in South Australia.

The joint venture between Hydro Tasmania and EHN is currently under construction and will consist of 33 x 2MW Vestas V80 turbines.

SKF will also supply the system to the Hydro Tasmania owned and operated 64 MW Woolnorth Windfarm in Tasmania, which has 37 x 1,75MW Vestas V66 turbines.

The 70 SKF WindCon units will improve the uptime of the wind turbines and optimise the schedule and efficiency of maintenance operations.

SKF WindCon is installed in the nacelle of each turbine.

The system continually collects data, automatically checking the vibration level of the rolling bearings, gear units and drive train as well as the condition of all monitoring devices and transducers.

It enables root cause analysis of a range of defects including mechanical imbalance and alignment errors.

When a malfunction or defect is found, an automatic alarm is transmitted to the central monitoring system of Hydro Tasmania and EHN.

Hydro Tasmania will monitor the Wind Turbines on both sites, but SKF has been contracted to provide a remote diagnostic service on a monthly basis, reporting any exceptions via SKF ProCon software.

Potential problems will be detected at an early stage allowing preventive maintenance to be implemented before unplanned downtime causes considerable loss of energy generation.

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