The main source of premature wind turbine failures is its gearbox. As a result, wind farm operators must evaluate the asset risk of their turbines because the average cost of fixing a wind turbine is between $300,000 and $700,000 per failure. This means wind farm operators can easily incur costs ranging to millions of dollars to deal with turbine failures.
Sentient Science has developed a prognostics based computational solution called DigitalClone that simulates real-world operating conditions for wind turbines. The system uses a “ground truth” model that represents a specific wind turbine and how it reacts under different operating conditions.
The system provides an accurate prediction of the performance of specific wind turbines down to their microstructure and accurately predict its remaining useful life. This prognostics approach can be used to simulate “what if” scenarios to let wind farm operators adjust operating conditions for an optimized or a required performance.
The result is the wind farm operator can focus on predicting failure instead of looking for indications of failure within data. DigitalClone runs itself so the wind farm operator can focus personnel on other tasks for greater productivity.