Down on the farm

摘要

Engineers have developed a piezoelectric sensor that lets wind farm operators know when bearings are about to fail. The sensor, developed by Wengu Chen, a mechanical engineering research student at Sheffield University, uses ultrasonic waves to measure the load transmitted through a bearing in a wind turbine. A paper describing the advance is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Prof Rob Dwyer-Joyce, co-author of the paper and director of the Leonardo Centre for Tribology at the university, said that a limiting factor with wind turbines is gearbox reliability, particularly in relation to bearings where manufacturers and operators have faced issues in relation to reliability.