Wind Turbines Get Sensitive:National Instruments’ optical sensors give monstrous blades a self-protective touch

Modern wind turbines cost well over a million dollars per megawatt. They earn by generating. They compete with cheap coal and currently, with very cheap natural gas for a place in the electricity market. Unscheduled down-time for a wind turbine could mean financial failure.

Turbines incorporate an array of sensing technologies that record and report the machine’s ongoing health as it stands up in incessant and varying, often damaging, weather. “If it’s not spinning, it’s not making any money. You certainly don’t want to spend millions and millions of dollars on a wind turbine to have it then go down for a mechanical problem,” said Brett Burger, Product Marketing Manager for Data Acquisition at virtual instrumentation technology powerhouse National Instruments (NI). But if you accurately monitor a turbine, Burger said, “the engineers and process managers can look at it and decide specifically when it needs to be taken offline rather than waiting for it to break down.”

Wind Turbines Get Sensitive : Greentech Media