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Historically, wind turbine gearbox failures have plagued the industry. Yet an effective oil analysis program will increase the reliability and availability of your machinery, while minimizing maintenance costs associated with oil change-outs, labor, repairs and downtime. Practical action steps are presented here to improve reliability.

In the summer of 1974, long before Argo, there was “AZORIAN” -- the code name for a CIA gambit to recover cargo entombed in a sunken Soviet submarine -- the K-129 -- from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The challenge: exhume -- intact -- a 2,000-ton submarine and its suspicious cargo from 17,000 feet of water.

Acetylene with DMF solvent enables benefits of low-pressure vacuum carburizing.

For metal replacement with powder metal (PM) of an automotive transmission, PM gear design differs from its wrought counterpart. Indeed, complete reverse-engineering and re-design is required so to better understand and document the performance parameters of solid-steel vs. PM gears. Presented here is a re-design (re-building a 6-speed manual transmission for an Opel Insignia 4-cylinder, turbocharged 2-liter engine delivering 220 hp/320 N-m) showing that substituting a different microgeometry of the PM gear teeth -- coupled with lower Young’s modulus -- theoretically enhances performance when compared to the solid-steel design.

This work establishes a baseline for aerospace spur gear behavior under oil-off conditions. The collected test results document a different oil-off time, dictated by material used.

Having outlasted the worldwide Great Recession, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) forecasts a constant growth in wind energy, i.e.: "increase in worldwide capacity to 460,000 MW by 2015."

Market needs push in 2013, but will it get one? The construction/off-highway industries have been here before. New equipment, technologies and innovations during an economic standstill that some have been dealing with since 2007.