INTEGRATED SOFTWARE FOR WIND TURBINE GEARBOX DESIGN DEVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

摘要

Romax Technology has developed RomaxDesigner software over many years to meet the challenges of other gearbox and driveline industries. The software has now been successfully applied to the wind turbine industry. This software enables a reduction in development risks by simulating the full gearbox system. The gear pairs, planetary gear system, bearings and shafts are represented as analysis objects. The planetary carriers and housing are represented as stiffness quality finite element components. These are combined together into one hyperstatic system in RomaxDesigner. The complex planetary gear carriers and gearbox housing are modelled by means of reduced stiffness matrices created in a finite element analysis package. The software allows gear and bearing durability analysis including the effects of system misalignments with excellent test correlation. Gear and bearing advanced contact analysis can also be conducted. Dynamic response analysis is used to determine housing vibration. A future development of full system acoustic noise simulation can be carried out using integrated interfaces with other software packages. The software has assisted specifically in the development of a 2MW gearbox, and this is used as a case study. The 2MW wind turbine gearbox was modelled in RomaxDesigner and the full 20 year operating duty cycle of the gearbox has been used for the analysis. This method allows a dramatic reduction in the size of the model and the run time compared to pure finite element analysis. This enables quick turn around of concept designs as well as responsive problem solving for existing gearboxes.