Finally, vibration acceptance levels for wind turbines

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The wind energy sector presents many variables that make reliability and maintenance a challenge for all involved with wind power plants. Wind Turbines, by reason of their design, location of installation and operation, do not abide by any international standard for vibration.

According to DIN ISO, condition-based maintenance for wind power plants means to maintain, visually inspect, measure, and analyze the condition of the turbines and perform required repairs.  However, how can one measure and evaluate vibration components of wind turbines when they have been excluded from international standards?

To increase reliability, uptime and operation of wind turbines, the Association of German Engineers, Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI), in collaboration with manufacturers, such as Prueftechnik Condition Monitoring, Ludeca’s principals, helped in developing the VDI 3834 vibration and evaluation standard for wind power plants.  The VDI 3834 standard will help to close the gap between this and other well established standards for threshold values of specific components. This means that vibration signals of wind power turbines are no longer a problem to measure and evaluate when using a vibration analyzer such as Vibxpert and its Omnitrend PC software which both feature built-in VDI measurement standards.

“Manufacturers and plant operators can now benefit from utilizing the vibration threshold values of drive train components. Consequently, they can deal with the challenge of maintaining these components in well running conditions. Proper alignment between the drive train and balancing of the rotor blades are important to condition monitoring of wind turbines…”, says Dr. Edwin Becker, Prueftechnik’s head of the service and diagnostic center.