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Materials Matter : The State of the Art of Wind Turbine Gearboxes
Much has been written here about the global growth in the wind turbine industry. Today, more than 341,320 wind turbines are operating worldwide. In particular, the number of offshore installations has exploded in the past seven years.
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Materials Matter: Nitriding’s “White Layer” and Isotropic Superfinishing
Developed in the early 20th century, nitriding has evolved into a standard process across many industrial applications. Often considered the simplest technique for case hardening, the process is commonplace in aircraft manufacturing, bearings, automotive components, turbine generation systems, and various industrial machineries.
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Repairing Wind Turbine Gears and Assemblies with Isotropic Superfinishing
As the wind turbine industry matures, the importance of operations and management (O&M) costs grows. In the early years of large kilowatt and small megawatt class wind turbines, pre-mature gearbox failure due to gear fatigue was very common and was a significant issue for wind turbine gearbox manufacturers, wind turbine OEM’s and owner-operators.
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Oil-Out Endurance Under the Lens
Oil-out conditions, or conditions in which an aircraft is operating without any oil in its gearbox or transmission, are devastating for an aircraft’s hardware.
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Materials Matter: Additive Manufacturing: Challenges, Possibilities, and the Gear Industry
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a technology that has the potential to fundamentally alter manufacturing, specifically metal manufacturing. The ability to design complex shapes, which could not otherwise be manufactured, coupled with a significant reduction in scrap metal, has obvious benefits.
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Materials Matter: Gear Corrosion in the Manufacturing Process
No matter how well gears are designed and manufactured, gear corrosion can occur during the manufacturing process, which may, in turn, result in catastrophic failure.
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Materials Matter: Comparing Surface Roughness Parameters
Effective gear design must account for a range of potential failure modes. As discussed in previous Materials Matter columns, gear failure modes can be fatigue-based and progressive (such as micropitting) or sudden (such as scuffing).
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Materials Matter: Lambda Ratio
The lambda ratio was originally developed to quantify the quality of lubricant operating regimes relative to bearing performance.
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Materials Matter: Micropitting
Micropitting is a gear failure mode that typically occurs when higher contact stresses are applied to hardened gear teeth. Unlike most other failure modes, micropitting does not always proceed to component failure if left unaddressed.
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Materials Matter: Scuffing
Gear meshing is one of the most complex areas of study in tribology. Meshing consists of both sliding and rolling motion and can be affected by a number of other operating parameters.
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Materials Matter: Wind Turbine Gear Repair
Wind turbine gearbox durability has improved significantly over the past ten years. The days of early gearbox failure due to epidemic micropitting are largely in the past.
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Materials Matter: Power Density and Isotropic Superfinishing
Power density, also described as load-carrying capacity, is simply the amount of load that can be safely transferred by a gear or other power transfer component without failure.
