Profile Grinding of Wind Energy Gears in the Context of the Global Energy Transition
Janis Thalau
Value for the audience
Der Vortrag vermittelt einen Überblick über aktuelle Entwicklungen und Technologien im Bereich des Profilschleifens von Verzahnungen für die Windenergie. Insbesondere für Anwender dieser Technologie können sich Ideen und Ansätze für eine produktivere und hochwertigere Fertigung ergeben. Darüber hinaus können auch für Zulieferer, beispielsweise Schleifwerkzeughersteller oder Hersteller von Messtechnik, von den vorgestellten Inhalten profitieren, da sie einen Überblick der zukünftigen Anforderungen an ihre Produkte erhalten. Darüber hinaus ist denkbar, dass auch Forschungseinrichtungen Ideen für zukünftige Forschungsarbeiten aus den präsentierten Inhalten ableiten können.
Summary
In recent decades the nominal power of wind turbines increased tremendously, with current developments in turbine technology reaching as much 20 MW of nominal power. These massive performance increases are associated with a significant growth in rotor blade diameter. As the circumferential speed of the blades is somewhat limited, the gear boxes are facing significantly higher torques while rotational speeds decrease. These altered conditions led to considerably wider gears and substantially larger flank modifications especially for the first gear stage. Besides these complex modifications which are usually exclusively manufacturable by means of 5-axis-interpolated profile grinding the surface quality of the entire gearing also becomes more and more relevant. In this context, a growing use of fine grinding processes can be observed, which pose further challenges for an efficient and economic manufacturing process. To address these challenging quality requirements while remaining competitive on an international market, the performance as well as range of features of gear profile grinding machines has been steady improved and expanded throughout the last years. In this presentation different approaches and solutions will be discussed, that can contribute to fulfilling the heightened requirements regarding gear geometry as well as surface quality. Until 2030 at least a doubling of installed wind power capacity is being expected with even more capacity being required to achieve the goals defined within the Paris Agreement (1.5 °C-goal). With this in mind, a further expansion of capacity for the production of gear boxes for wind turbines can also be assumed. In this context, it will also be discussed which approaches can be pursued to not only address new quality requirements but also contribute to fulfilling higher demands in regard to the productivity of profile grinding processes of gears for wind turbines.