Wind Turbine Gearbox Predictive Maintenance

The problem on site

A failure in the gearbox, main shaft or generator means lifting equipment and a trip up the tower or offshore, with long downtime. High humidity and wide temperature swings also make condensation in the gear oil likely.

Architecture: oil and vibration

• Gear oil: WIO series sensors continuously measure water activity and temperature of the gearbox oil and warn before free water forms.
• Vibration: HY-VT3K / HY-VT5K triaxial vibration and temperature sensors on the main shaft, gearbox and generator bearings compute the FFT spectrum (VT3K 0–3 kHz, VT5K 0–5 kHz, Δf 0.488 Hz), velocity and displacement in the sensor and output ISO 10816-3 A/B/C/D zones directly. The low-noise VT3K suits the slow-turning main shaft.

The sensors connect over RS-485 Modbus RTU to the ETH-VHS-A2N vibration monitoring gateway, which computes zones, a health score (0–100) and alarm events inside the nacelle using the HOYAN-CBM criteria. Only results go upstream, not raw waveforms, which suits remote sites with limited bandwidth; spectra are captured when an event triggers them.

What changes

• Status without climbing the tower: zones and health scores can be ranked and compared from shore.
• Where the fault is: the zone says something is wrong; the spectrum helps tell bearing, gear mesh or alignment apart.
• Little data to send: results go upstream, not whole waveforms.