Decatur Industrial Machinists and Millwrights Provide Custom Solution for Wind Farm

A turbine of this size can produce over $1,000,000 of electricity annually.  With the replacement motor’s estimated lead-time being 6-months or more, this repair could easily be a savings of up to half-a-million dollars.

A Decatur Industrial WIND customer had a pitch motor damaged during installation. The motor suffered a broken stator foot and a replacement motor from the OEM would not be available for many months. The foot and stator yolk are cast as one piece and not replaceable without replacing the entire stator yolk assembly.  The customer engaged us to find a way to repair the motor so it could immediately go back into service.

Decatur Industrial machinists knew that without all four mounting feet on the motor it was unusable in the application, preventing the turbine from operating. Our team got to work machining the entire side of the stator with the fractured foot. We milled the yolk to remove the remainder of the damaged foot support structure. We also removed the rear foot on the damaged side of the stator along with the support structure.  A complete new front and rear foot assembly with support structure was machined to fit the stator.  The foot had to mount precisely to the stator and provide the exact footprint with bolt pattern to allow the motor to bolt into the turbine.  We installed the new foot assembly and then replaced the damaged bearings.  The motor was fully assembled, test run, and shipped to the wind farm.  The farm installed the repaired motor which enabled the turbine to come back on-line, producing power for customers.

Decatur Wind Provides Custom Fabricated Solution for Wind Turbine

A turbine of this size can produce over $1,000,000 of electricity annually.  With the replacement motor's estimated lead-time being 6-months or more, this repair could easily be a savings of up to half-a-million dollars.

A Decatur Industrial WIND customer had a motor damaged during installation. The motor suffered a broken stator foot and a replacement motor from the OEM would not be available for many months. The foot and stator yolk are cast as one piece and not replaceable without replacing the entire stator yolk assembly.  The customer engaged us to find a way to repair the motor so it could immediately go back into service.

Decatur Industrial machinists knew that without all four mounting feet on the motor it was unusable in the application, preventing the turbine from operating. Our team got to work machining the entire side of the stator with the fractured foot. We milled the yolk to remove the remainder of the damaged foot support structure. We also removed the rear foot on the damaged side of the stator along with the support structure.  A complete new front and rear foot assembly with support structure was machined to fit the stator.  The foot had to mount precisely to the stator and provide the exact footprint with bolt pattern to allow the motor to bolt into the turbine.  We installed the new foot assembly and then replaced the damaged bearings.  The motor was fully assembled, test run, and shipped to the wind farm.  The farm installed the repaired motor which enabled the turbine to come back on-line, producing power for customers.

Rivian will use wind energy to power up to 75% of its Illinois factory

Rivian (RIVN) signed a new Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) today to source 50 MW of clean electricity from Apex Clean Energy’s proposed Goose Creek Wind Farm. The EV marker will use the wind energy purchase and its other renewable energy initiatives to power up to 75% of its Normal, Illinois, manufacturing facility.

Rivian says it “exists to create products and services that help our planet transition to carbon-neutral energy and transportation” The company is known for making adventure-oriented electric vehicles. But Rivian also claims, “in order to create the change we seek, we go beyond what is expected of us.”

Read the rest of the story here: https://electrek.co/2022/12/05/rivian-rivn-using-wind-energy-to-power-75-of-its-illinois-factory/

Your Trusted Choice for Singly Fed Induction Generator Remanufacturing

Singly Fed Induction Generators (SFIG) coupled directly to the grid have been successfully used in wind turbines for decades. Decatur Wind has extensive expertise in all the electromechanical aspects of these machines.  In the wind renewables industry, some of the more popular SFIGs that we have a longstanding history of supporting are the Vestas and Elin 1.65MW machines.

With attentive maintenance activities, generators can continue serving decade after decade.  Decatur Wind follows our customer specifications, EASA AR 100, IEEE, and in-house quality procedures as defined in our QA manual.

Ultimately, once the new windings pass all electrical inspection and testing, they are processed through our D.I.E. Enduralast Global VPI systems.  This is an epoxy vacuum-pressure-impregnation system that mitigates voltage stress failures and boosts mechanical support to inhibit winding movement.  These unique features were purposely developed to bring enhanced reliability to each repair we perform for the wind industry.

Our team welcomes the opportunity to perform repairs, upgrades, and reliability improvements related to your generators.

Connection Failures

We see connection failures at the internal lead-cable to coil-lead connections in wind generators. These tend to have prematurely failed due to overheating and resulted in blown connections. A good deal of those failures can be attributed to issues in brazing those connections. Many winding technicians are tricked into a false sense of achieving a proper connection especially when basic winding analyzer tests show the proper ohms per circuit. Consider that these connections have stout wire, possibly a #12-gauge magnet wire, just over .080” (2mm) in diameter each, and 19 wires-in-hand (wires in parallel) coming out of the stator coil groups for connection to a lead cable. It can be challenging to get every one of those 19 wires-in-hand brazed to the lead cable. The attached picture is an example of the stator coil leads that each need connected to a lead cable and brought outside the generator for termination.

Relying on one basic test from even the most advanced of our modern technologies to test this connection can give you a false sense of having achieved that 100% connection. Sure, we want to see the resistance of that circuit and certainly the circuit must flow the voltage applied or generated however, the main purpose of that connection is to carry the current. We can twist bare wires together and they can test the proper ohms. This simple type of connection can pass voltage through a no-load circuit just fine. The situation changes when the connection is under current. If one or more of the coil lead wires-in-hand are not 100% connected to the lead cable in a method that can handle the current the connection gets hotter leading to reduced reliability. Brazing is the most common method utilized to enable the full current carrying capability.

Facebook parent Meta to use all energy generated by Iowa wind farm to power Altoona data center

Facebook parent Meta will use the full output of a 225-megawatt wind farm project in central Iowa to help power its data center in Altoona, wind energy developer Apex Clean Energy said Monday.

Apex said Meta will buy all the energy generated by the Great Pathfinder wind farm in Boone and Hamilton counties to help support the growing facility. Meta announced in December that it will be the company's largest in the world globally upon completion in 2025 of a final expansion.

The project will bring the total floorspace of Meta's Altoona complex to more than 5 million square feet. 

Great Pathfinder Wind is expected to begin commercial operations in 2022. 

Meta, which first announced plans for the Altoona in 2013, has invested roughly $2.5 billion in the site, which employs about 400 people.

Read the rest here.

Advanced RCFA

Many farms recognize their generators, from various OEMs, will fail within a TYPICAL number of years. Often these failures are accepted, anticipated, and an adopted part of our maintenance planning. The assumption is that the generator components are predestined to fail around this time frame of service, just like buying new tires for your automobile based on mileage. We use Root-Cause-Failure-Analysis (RCFA) expertise to proactively look for opportunities to improve the components.

Applying our knowledge from thousands of RCFAs from decades of investigations uniquely equips us to determine the root cause. The power to provide a logical and understandable relationship to the failure as well as potential solutions to bring greater generator reliability.

Examples of Improvements through RCFA

• Enhanced insulation systems

• Reduced voltage stresses

• Lowered thermal stresses

• Correcting multiple machining deviations through precision mechanical tolerances. We remove undesirable eccentricities that effect electromotive force (EMF) within the generator improving performance and reducing losses

• Shaft-current mitigation systems through multiple focus areas such as use of hybrid-ceramic bearings and advanced shaft grounding