contest entry for the fluke education contest

1. Wind Turbine Slip
Ring Health
MeasurementWestern Iowa Tech Community College
Sioux City & Cherokee IA Campuses
Dec 5, 2014

2. The Team
• Team Members
– Jeff Parks
– Simon Grossart
– Mauricio Garcia
• Advisor
– Chad Plante
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A special thanks to:
Wind and Solar Specialists: (http://www.wassus.com) Access to wind turbine
Amatrol: (http://www.amatrol.com/product/wind-turbine-technology/) Simulator
manufacturer
Wells Ag Supply (http://www.wellsagsupply.com) Owner of wind turbine
Ethan Hinkel: Safety advisor
Karl Altmanshofer: Photographer

3. Objective
Objective
(Decrease the amount of time required to diagnose the health of and
troubleshoot/repair an intermittent fault in a wind turbine slip ring by 20%
for an average sized wind farm)
Metric used
Problem fixed/work completed in less time = measuring time/work-hours.
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4. Methodology
Setup
– Used a wind turbine simulator manufactured by Amatrol to engineer a
controlled failure on one portion of the slip ring, then proceeded to monitor
a variety of variables using Fluke Connect tools
– Monitored the resolution of the different variables to decide which one was
best to monitor
• We determined that monitoring the voltage gave us the best resolution
• Use of the thermal imager also helped isolate the problem
– Compared the values given for amperage, voltage and temperature across
the engineered failure
– Field tested the tools to verify that our tests could be done on the turbine
• Wind and Solar Specialists arranged access to a turbine owned by Wells Ag for this
part of the testing
– Used video to document the amount of time required to access and set up
the tests
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5. Setup
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6. Results
• Baseline measurement
– There are a number of variables that effect our Baseline, we used our industry experts to get an
average for all of these variables thus making certain assumptions about them
– Without the fluke connect tools there was not a way to view the tools live readings from a
rotating hub
• Stopping the hub with the brush on the bad spot was mainly luck
– We will assume a 140 turbine site that experiences 30 of this type of failure per year
– Average reduction of misdiagnosis of 5 turbine failures/ year
– Average time per occurrence of 3 hours
• Includes travel time ascending and descending time and documentation
– 3 person team (usually required for safety reasons)
• Results
– (Number of Failures) X (Time to repair failure) X (Number of technicians)
Metric Goal Before After Total
change
workhours -20% 270 hr 180 hr 17 %
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7. Results
• Logged data for a 24 volt signal on a stationary slip ring
showing proper values (misdiagnosis)
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8. Results
• Logged data for the same 24 volt signal while rotating
revealing bad segments of the slip ring
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9. Results
• Thermal image of hot brush during testing
– Actual temp would have been much higher in a real world scenario as
we were using very low amperage on our simulator
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10. Results Cont.
• Other factors not quantified
– We did not quantify the value of equipment downtime
– our measurements are for the application of these tools on one
particular type of failure, these tools will impact all types of failures
– We were not able to accurately quantify the reduction of
documentation for the failures that were properly diagnosed via the
use of the Fluke Connect App
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11. Impact & Recommendations
• Our team is very impressed with how user friendly the Fluke Connect system is
to use
• After completing our tests and working with the tools our team discovered
many more applications that the Fluke Connect system can make the
renewable energy field safer, much more efficient and reliable
• Our industry partner, Wind and Solar specialists, was very impressed with the
capabilities of these new tools and commented that the quality of the
documentation obtained by the Fluke Connect system using actual tool reading
photo, video and voice notes would reduce project times substantially
• After working with the Fluke Connect system we would like to see a few things
– A way to email the entire work order
– More universal support across different types of devices including PCs
• Wind and Solar Specialists and Western Iowa Tech Community college would
like to continue to assist Fluke with field testing and research for the Fluke
Connect system
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12. Lessons learned
• Lessons learned
– An intermittent system failure is harder to simulate than originally thought
– The thermal imager will not connect to the app if your Ipad's WIFI is not connected to the
imager
• Something that surprised us
– How easy the system was to use compared to how complex and capable it is
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