Insulated bearing models for wind turbine generators

What is a main bearing for a wind turbine?

the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This paper presents a review of existing theory and practice relating to main bearings for wind turbines. The main bearing performs the critical role of supporting the turbine rotor, with replacements typically requiring its complete removal.

What type of bearing is used for a generator?

The company manufactures all sizes of mainshaft bearings, from designs for common 1.5-MW turbines to the more recent 3.5-MW designs. MEGAOHM bearings for generators are ceramic coated. For generators, insulated bearings include the Megaohm Series. These are well insulated against electrical currents.

Where do wind turbine bearings come from?

Several bearing configurations for wind turbines come from NTN Bearing Co. of America, Mt. Prospect, Ill. For instance, for main shafts, designs include spherical roller bearings. The company says these increase efficiency and service life.

Why should you choose NTN Bearings for your wind turbine?

Wind turbine technology continues to demand increased efficiency, reliability and longer service life of equipment. Innovative bearing designs from NTN are instrumental in these improvements and in spreading the use of wind technology for electrical power generation.

Can full bearing modelling be used in wind turbine gearbox bearings?

Full bearing modelling has been done to analyse fatigue failure in wind turbine gearbox bearings (Grujicic et al., 2016; Jiang et al., 2015; Lai and Stadler, 2016) and in one case for a WTMB under steady-state loads (Liang et al., 2013), and also to understand contact loads within pitch or yaw bearings (Chen and Wen, 2012).

What is insulated ceramic bearing?

converts rotational energy into electrical energy.) Rolling elements in insulated ceramic bearings are made from silicon nitride ceramic (Si3N4) JTEKT was the first company in the world to develop and install insulated hybrid ceramic bearings in Wind Turbines.