The 24th edition of the European Conference on Fatigue (ECF24) took place in Zagreb (Croatia) from 26th to 30th August. Part of Ikerlan's Structural Reliability team presented their latest research on MEEVCE and MEEVCE II.
Maite Gargía, researcher at Ikerlan, presented her work under the title ‘Digital Twin for the Prediction of Wear in Gear-based Transmissions of Wind Turbines’. Below, you can find the abstract of the paper:
Wind industry is currently facing the challenge of extending the useful life of the currently installed machinery and designing models with greater capacity. This has led to the imperative need to understand the most recurrent failure modes of its critical components, among which gear transmission systems stand out. Among the causes of failures in gear systems, abrasive wear is a prominent failure mode, causing changes in load distribution between teeth and contributing to other types of failures.
In this research, the focus is on developing a tool which can run as a digital twin, assessing a differentiated methodology in stages that applies a local perspective of the contact between gear teeth. To achieve this, differentiation in the contact print between rolling and sliding areas is carried out, allowing for a comprehensive contact analysis. The application of this approach to the calculation of both driving and driven gears, in both spur and helical gears, reflects the progress of the development outlined earlier by the authors.
In order to ensure that analytical models align precisely with real structural behavior, validation has been conducted through finite element analysis.