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Procedia Computer Science 00 (2016) 000–000
ScienceDirect www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
ScienceDirect
Procedia Computer Science 00 (2016) 000–000
Procedia Computer Science 109C (2017) 809–816
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

The 7th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Information Technology

(SEIT 2017)
The 7th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Information Technology
Type Synthesis of (SEIT Gear-box
2017) in Wind Turbine
a a a a,
Jun Qiu
Type , Boxing Liu
Synthesis , Huimin Dong
of Gear-box in ,Wind
Delun Wang *
Turbine
a
School of mechanical engineering, Dalian university of technology, Dalian116024, China
Jun Qiua, Boxing Liua, Huimin Donga, Delun Wanga,*
a
School of mechanical engineering, Dalian university of technology, Dalian116024, China
Abstracts

This paper describes the development of wind power in the world from 2000 to 2015 and the main technical
Abstracts
routes of both international and Chinese wind turbine. The main current type of gear-box of wind turbine under
different rated power are summarized, and the future types of gear-box with power split transmission are presented
andThis
will paper describes
be predicted the future
in the development of wind
wind turbines power
with moreinthan
the 5MW.
world In
from 2000
order to 2015
to obtain theand
newthe main
types of technical
gear-box
routes
for 6Wofwindbothturbines,
international
a newandtypeChinese
synthesis wind turbine.
approach The mainby
is proposed current
meanstype of state
of the gear-boxspaceofmethod.
wind turbine
Through under
the
different rated
operation of thepower
dual are summarized,
vectors and theand
of the internal future typesmeshing
external of gear-box with power
transmission splitaccording
units transmission areconnection
to the presented
and will
rules be predicted
of series, parallelinand
the hybrid,
future wind turbines
the state with more
equations than 5MW.
of different In order to obtain
gear transmission systems the are
newderived.
types ofAtgear-box
last, an
for 6W wind
example turbines, a new gear-box
of speed-increasing type synthesis
of 6MWapproach is proposed
wind turbine by means
is taken to showofthe
the process
state space method.
of type Through
synthesis, andthe
16
operation of the dual
types are proposed for vectors
referringofthe
theconstruction
internal anddesign
external meshing
of 6MW windtransmission units according to the connection
turbine gear-box.
rules of series,
Keywords: parallel
Gear-box; and hybrid,
Type Synthesis; Wind the state equations of different gear transmission systems are derived. At last, an
Turbine
1877-0509
example of© speed-increasing
2017 The Authors. gear-box
Published byof Elsevier
6MW wind B.V. turbine is taken to show the process of type synthesis, and 16
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.
types are proposed for referring the construction design of 6MW wind turbine gear-box.
Introduction
Keywords: Gear-box; Type Synthesis; Wind Turbine

Wind energy is a clean, green renewable energy; wind power generation is one of the most mature technologies
Introduction
in the field of energy and the most large-scale development conditions and commercial development prospects. The
development of wind power is very important to solve the energy crisis, reduce environmental pollution, and adjust
theWind
energyenergy
structureis a and
clean, green
so on. renewable
Hence, energy; wind
wind turbine’s power
design, generation
manufacture andis maintenance
one of the most mature
attract technologies
considerate talent
in
and funds. The technical routes of wind turbine mainly contain three branches, which can roughly be classifiedThe
the field of energy and the most large-scale development conditions and commercial development prospects. as,
development
double of wind power
feed, semi-direct is very
driving andimportant to solve
direct driving. Thetheformer
energytwo
crisis,
are reduce environmental
mainstream pollution,
products that and adjust
take 85% of the
the energy
whole marketstructure
and they andareso both
on. Hence,
equipped wind turbine’s
with design,
speed-up manufacture
gear-boxes. and maintenance
Therefore, gear-box hasattract
alwaysconsiderate
been takentalent
as a
and funds. The technical
key component of wind turbine. routes of wind turbine mainly contain three branches, which can roughly be classified as,
double feed, semi-direct driving and direct driving. The former two are mainstream products that take 85% of the
whole market
* Delun and+86they
Wang. Tel.: are bothfax:equipped
0411-84708081; with speed-up gear-boxes. Therefore, gear-box has always been taken as a
+86 0411-84708081;.
keyE-mail
component of wind turbine.
address: delunwang@dlut.edu.cn

* Delun Wang. Tel.: +86 0411-84708081; fax: +86 0411-84708081;.

1877-0509 © 2016 delunwang@dlut.edu.cn
E-mail address: The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.

1877-0509 © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.

1877-0509 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.
10.1016/j.procs.2017.05.333
810 Jun Qiu et al. / Procedia Computer Science 109C (2017) 809–816
2 Jun Qiu, Boxing Liu, Huimin Dong, Delun Wang / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2015) 000–000

As survey conducted by China Wind Energy Association(CWEA) shows, 1.5MW wind turbine which launched
in 2004 has been the most installed wind turbine till now, however, 2MW wind turbine experienced a dramatically
increasing in recent years and the new installed capacity just exceeded 1.5MW in 2015. Now the technology of
3MW platform has been gradually mature，and most wind power companies in the world are also developing more
than 5MW wind turbines[1]. Larger power may be the development trend of wind turbine from now on. With the
increase of wind turbine power, the speed-up gear-box faces new problem to be solved: the inevitable increase of
load and the reasonable reducing of the volume and weight. Therefore, how to synthesize the types of the gear-box
with the high power density is becoming the technical bottleneck of larger power wind turbine. Based on the design
conditions of gear-box for wind turbines in the world, a new method, the novel state space approach [2-4], is
introduced to synthesize the types of gear-box of high power wind turbine in this paper.

1. The development of wind turbine and gear-box

From 2000 to 2015, the global wind turbine cumulative capacity has grown from 17400MW to 432,419 MW and
cumulative annual growth rate reached 17%. According to ’Global Wind Energy Outlook 2016’, written by Global
Wind Energy Council (GWEC), the advanced scenario 100GW capacity will be installed in 2020 and the total
capacity will rise up to 879 GW. By the year of 2030, these two figures will be 145GW and 2110GW. Furthermore,
208GW will be installed in 2050 and total capacity will be 5,806GW [5]. Wind turbine is the core equipment to
promote the development of wind power, which has a decisive effect on the technical economy of wind power
generation, while the gear-box is the core component of the wind turbine.

1.1. Wind Turbine in the world

Take a glance at the global cumulative installed wind power from 2000, a steady growth rate can be seen out in
the Fig.1. Except 2013, annual net growth capacity also exaggerated and results in a stunning 63,467MW
installment in 2015[6].

Fig. 1. Global cumulative installed wind power 2001-2015

The Table.1 shows main current products of top 6 wind turbine manufacturers in the world except from China
and new-launched product. It says with the enlargement of wind turbines’ capacity, driving systems should find their
way of adaptation. Double-fed wind turbine stands out for their reliability, low cost in manufacture and maintenance,
safety, and resistant to erosion in off-shore site. Although direct driving type is being researched and adopted in
some of high capacity wind turbine, it can be safely predicted that double fed and semi-direct driving techniques
will remain their position for several years in the future, and the gear-box as a key component still needs to be
developed and will embraced by a continuous welcoming market.

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Table 1. Global current wind turbine and new-launched product.

Manufacturer Power(MW) Feature description
2 Double-fed generator, 3stages gear-box:2 planetary,1 parallel
Vestas
8 Semi-direct drive， medium-speed gear-box
2 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box: 1 planetary, 2 parallel
Gamesa
5 Semi-direct drive, 2stages gear-box:2 Planetary
2.3 Double-fed generator,3 stages gear-box: 3 planetary
Siemens
7 Direct drive
2 Double-fed generator,3 stages gear-box:2 planetary,1 parallel
GE
6 Direct drive
1.5 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box: 1 planetary, 2 parallel
Nordex
6 Direct drive
2.3 Double-fed generator,3 stages gear-box: 1 planetary, 2 parallel
Power-split system
ZF(Bosch)
6.15 Double-fed generator,3 stages gear-box:2 planetary,1 parallel Power-split
system

1.2. Wind Turbine in China

Due to the wind power market and domestic policy in last 10 years, China has been a pioneer in wind power
industries, or we can say it enters an era of rapid growth in 21st century, which is able to stay at 25% per year even
after reach 100GW total installment. Given 253GW on-shore and 750GW off-shore available wind power, there’s
enormous potential in China’s wind power market. China’s wind power market in 2001-2015 is shown in Fig 2.
China has taken the biggest share of the global market by 34% percent and even more accomplished 48% of global
new installed capacity in 2015, shown in Fig.3[7]. Table 2 shows the wind turbine manufacturers develop their
technique routes and also support the domestic market of double fed wind turbines demand growing in now and
after. Therefore, it is confidently predicted optimistic market of the speed-up gear-box.

Fig. 2. China cumulative installed wind power 2001-2015[5]

a b

Fig. 3. (a) 2015 Top 10 countries new installed capacity[5]; (b) 2015 Top 10 countries cumulative capacity[5].

Table 2. China principal wind turbine and new-launched product.

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Manufacturer Power(MW) Feature description

2.5 Direct drive
Gold wind
6 Direct drive
2 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:2 planetary, 1 parallel
United power
6 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:2 planetary, 1 parallel
2 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:1 planetary, 2 parallel
Sinovel
6 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:2 planetary, 1 parallel Power-split
Mingyang wind 1.5 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:2 planetary, 1 parallel
power 3 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:2 planetary
1.5 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:1 planetary, 2 parallel
Dongfang electric
3 Double-fed generator, 3 stages gear-box:2 planetary, 1 parallel

1.3. Gear-box of Wind Turbine

The technical route of wind power gear-box can be classified as three kinds: fixed axis gear transmission, traditional planetary
gear transmission and closed differential gear drive. The last one is power split, which has the phenomenon of the split flow of
power and the force, and the input loads are shared by components from different stage. With the increase of power, the
configuration and structure of gear-box are becoming more complex. The power split configuration is widely used in
5MW~6MW wind turbine.

Table 3. The main current types and schematic of wind power.

Power The main current types and schematic of wind power gear-box

≤500KW

500KW~
2MW

2MW~
5.0MW

>5.0MW

2. Type Synthesis of Gear-box for Wind Turbine

In fact, whatever a gear-box has how many gears, in which all gears meshing can be classified as two kinds, the
internal gear meshing and the external gear meshing. That is, a gear-box consists of several pairs of internal gear
meshing, external gear meshing, or their combination.
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2.1. State equation of gear transmission unit

One of the most simple planetary gear transmissions, as shown in Fig. 4 (a), can be seen as a combination of
internal gear meshing (Fig.4 (b)) and external gear meshing (Fig.4 (c)),Where C represents the planet carrier，P
represents the planetary gear，S represents the sun gear，R represents the ring gear. Hence, a pair of external gears
meshing is defined as an external gear transmission unit while a pair of internal gears meshing is called as an
internal gear transmission unit. It is obvious that a planetary gear transmission can be viewed as the combination of
the internal gear transmission unit and the external gear transmission unit.

Fig. 4. Planetary gear transmission

The gear transmission unit may be a single degree-of-freedom (DOF) mechanism (Fig. 4b) or a two DOFs
mechanism (Fig.4c). They all have achieved the transmission of the kinematic, dynamic and structure characteristics
information from the input shaft to the output shaft. The state characteristic of input shaft or output shaft is
represented by the vector with sub-components. A gear-box has an input state vector denoted by Ri=(ωi Mi ri)T and
the output state vector Ro=(ωo Mo ro)T. The relationship between the input state vector and output state vector can be
expressed as
Ro  Aj  Ri (1)
Ro  Aj1  Ri1  Aj 2  Ri 2 (2)
where λωi, λMi, λri respectively are the transformation sub-matrix of rotate speed vector, torque vector and structure
vector, they constitute the transformation matrix Aj.
The state equations of a gear transmission unit reveal the relationship among the gear transmission unit, the dual
vectors, the transformation matrix. They correspond to each other one to one. Different gear transmission unit can be
obtained through the method of kinematic inversion by the operation rules for dual vectors in state-space [8-9].

2.2. The State equation of gear-box

A gear transmission system, or a gear-box, is the combination of several gear transmission units, which can be
synthesized by means of the state equations. Based on the analysis of currently gear transmissions, three typical
forms to connect two gear transmission units are taken as: series-connection (Fig.5(a)), parallel -connection
(Fig.5(b)) and hybrid-connection (Fig.5(c)).

a b c

Fig. 5. (a) series-connection; (b) parallel-connection; (c) hybrid-connection

814 Jun Qiu et al. / Procedia Computer Science 109C (2017) 809–816
6 Jun Qiu, Boxing Liu, Huimin Dong, Delun Wang / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2015) 000–000

A gear-box with fixed shaft gear transmission is formed by two gear transmission units with single DOF using
series connection (Fig.5a), whose state equation can be written as equation(3). A planetary gear-box is designated as
one gear transmission unit with single DOF and one gear transmission unit with two DOFs using parallel connection
(Fig.5b), whose state equation is derived as the equation (4). A gear-box is comprised of two gear transmission units
with two DOFs using hybrid connection (Fig.5c), whose state equation is expressed as the equation (5).
Ro  A2  A1  Ri (3)
Ro  A21  A1  Ri  A22  Ri (4)
Ro  A21   A11  Ri 2  A12  Ri 1   A22  Ri 1 (5)

2.3. Type Synthesis of Gear-box

The type synthesis of a gear-box is to establish the state-space equation from input vector to output vector of for
several a certain number of gear transmission units connected in series, parallel or hybrid connection. The state
equation of a gear-box transmission system is presented as follows. The type synthesis of a gear-box is to establish
the state-space equation from input vector to output vector for several gear transmission units connected in series,
parallel or hybrid. The state equation of a gear-box is presented as
 Ro A* ( Aj )  Ri (6)
where A is the global transformation matrix of a gear-box, a function of transformation matrix of gear transmission
units; Ri is the state vector of input terminal; R0 is the state vector of output terminal.
The transformation matrix and the state equation are one to one correspondence, hence, the type synthesis of a
gear-box is to decompose the global transformation matrix of a gear-box to be the transformation matrix of gear
transmission units by means of the state equations, or
A*  A2  A1 (7)
A*  A21  A1  A22 (8)
A*  A21  A11  ( A21  A12  A22 ) (9)
The results of the type synthesis of a gear-box is a possible connections of gear transmission units, which meet
the transmission performance constraints, such as the constraints of kinematic, dynamic, structure and power flow
etc.[8].

3. An example

The weight, bearing capacity and reliability of the gear-box depend on its type. So type synthesis of the gear-box
directly determines the technological level of the wind turbine. A gear-box of 6MW wind turbine is taken as an
example to show the process of type synthesis by means of the state space approach.
(1) Design conditions of a gear-box for 6MW wind turbine
The stage number of gear-box is random generally. However, the design conditions of 6MW wind turbine is a
three-stage, including 2-stage planetary and 1-stage parallel gear transmission. Design conditions of the gear-box are
listed in Table 4.

Table 4. Design conditions of the gear-box of 6MW wind turbine

Power ratings(MW) Drive ratio Speed of hub(rpm) Weight (T) Technical routes
6.67 120 9 32 2-stage planetary and 1-stage parallel
The speed ωi, the torque Mi, the position and orientation ri of input terminal; the speed ωo, the torque Mo, the
position and orientation ro of output terminal, all of their values can be obtained from the Table 4.
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Jun Qiu, Boxing Liu, Huimin Dong, Delun Wang / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2015) 000–000 7

(2) Input and output state vectors.

Ri  (i M i ri )T Ro  (o Mo ro )T
(3) Total transfer equation
Ro  A* ( Aj )  Ri
(4)Constraints
Kinematic constraint: same direction and speed up.
i f ( k )  1 ;
Dynamic constraint: reverse direction and reduced.
 j f (k )  1 0 ;
Power flow constraint: power split.
 g f ( k )  0 .
Structure constraint: concentric constraint.
T 
 k f ( k )  E ;
 
 1
(5) The decomposition of total transform matrix
The design objective is 2-stage planetary and 1-stage parallel gear transmission. So the global transform matrix
will be decomposed fourth times to get 5 gear transmission units. In particular, the last stage has been identified as
an external gear transmission unit.
The first decomposition of the global matrix: the number of input shaft ηi=1, the number of output shaft η0=1.
Due to the last stage has been identified as an external gear transmission unit, so the initial matrix decomposition is :
A*  A2  A1 (10)
The second decomposition of the global matrix ： the design objective has 2-stage planetary transmission,
according to equation (10), the matrix A1 can be decomposed as equation (8) :
A*  A2  ( A1 21  A11  A1 22 ) (11)
The third decomposition of the global matrix: according to the equation (11), the matrix A1-1 can be decomposed
as the equations (7) and (8), that is :
A*  A2  ( A1 21  A11 2  A111  A1 22 ) (12)
A*  A2  ( A1 21   A11 21  A111  A11 22   A1 22 ) (13)
The fourth decomposition of the global matrix: according to equation (12), the matrix A1-2 can be decomposed as
equation (9):
A*  A2  ( A1 21 21  A1 2111  A11 2  A111  ( A1 22 21  A1 2212  A12222 )) (14)
*
A  A2  (( A1 21 21  A1 2112  A1 21 22 )  A11 2  A111  A12221  A12211 ) (15)
According to equation (13), the matrix A1-2 can be decomposed as equation (9) :
A*  A2  ( A1 21 21  A1 2111   A11 21  A111  A11 22 
(16)
 ( A1 22 21  A1 2212  A1 22 22 ))
A*  A2  (( A1 21 21  A1 2112  A1 21 22 )   A11 21  A111  A11 22 
(17)
 A1 22 21  A1 2211 )
As mentioned above equations (14)-(17), the types of gear-box of 6MW semi-direct drive wind generator gear-
box can be obtained according to the kinematic meaning of the matrixes decomposed and their corresponding
schematic are shown in Table 4. Hence, the results of the type synthesis can be referred to design the construction of
a gear-box for 6MW wind turbine. Maybe each one has their own characteristics. And how to evaluate the results of
type synthesis through the analysis of transmission ratio, power flow, and bearing capacity will be discussed in
continued papers.
816 Jun Qiu et al. / Procedia Computer Science 109C (2017) 809–816
8 Jun Qiu, Boxing Liu, Huimin Dong, Delun Wang / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2015) 000–000

Table 5 The types of gear-box for 6MW semi-direct drive wind generator

4. Conclusion

(1) As the increase of global wind power installed capacity, the gear-box with greater power may be the
development trend of wind turbine from now on, which will be more technical and economic feasibility.(2) The
speed-up gear-box with greater power causes the increase of load while the reducing of the volume and weight is a
reasonable requirement for 6MW wind turbine with gear-box, which leads to that a gear-box with power split
transmission is adoptively produced.(3) A new type synthesis method is proposed for wind turbine gear-box, and 16
types are presented for referring in construction design of 6MW wind power gear-box.

Acknowledgments

The authors want to acknowledge the support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51375065)

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