Power Generation Industry Solutions
Overview
Induction heating can be used to produce wind turbines with reduced maintenance and maximum uptime. In today’s global economy, manufacturers of power generation equipment face many challenges. While continually seeking ways to drive down production costs and accelerate time-to-market, improved product quality and manufacturing consistency are absolutely essential. And particularly in the power generation industry, environmental concerns have begun to play a major role.
To address all these concerns, manufacturers of power generation equipment are turning to the one heating technology that can meet them all: induction heating. Induction heating is a quick, clean, non-contact method of inducing heat for a wide variety of metal joining and heat treating applications used in the manufacture of power generation equipment. When compared to convection, radiant, open flame or other heating methods, induction heating offers substantial advantages:
- Increased consistency with solid state temperature control & closed loop monitoring systems
- Maximized productivity with in-cell operation; no soaking time or lengthy cool down cycles
- Improved quality with minimized product warpage, distortion and reject rates
- Extended fixture life with site-specific heat without heating any surrounding parts
- Environmentally sound without flame, smoke, waste heat, noxious emissions or loud noise
- Reduced energy consumption with up to 80% energy efficient operation
Production of Gears and Slewing Rings for Wind Turbines
As the global demand for clean energy increases, wind turbine machines have become increasingly popular because of their relatively small carbon footprint. Designed to produce electricity from the kinetic power of the wind, they produce large amounts of electricity when grouped together in onshore or offshore windfarms.
The production of gear boxes for wind turbines requires a series of paintstaking and expensive manufacturing processes to ensure that the parts have the required quality, strength and durability. Industrial heat treating and hardening sytems from GH Induction Atmospheres can greatly simplify the manufacturing process for slewing rings as well as yaw, pitch and rotor bearings. With precise accuracy and control, GH IA systems can selectively harden specific areas of the gear, producing parts with superior strength and wear resistance.
With heat treating systems from GHIA , manufacturers of wind turbine machines can produce turbines with lower maintenance costs and maximum uptime. Horizontal double rotating table for gear hardening
Industrial Gas Turbine Engine Component Repair
It has become much more economical to repair costly industrial gas turbine engine components than to replace them. Our turnkey induction heating systems provide cost effective, time-saving solutions for repairing high pressure turbine (HPT) blade tips, Ti weld stress relief, brazing metering plates to dovetails and wear pads to mid-span spars, brazing honeycomb seals and other engine components, handling orphan parts and many other applications.
Worn HTP blade tips can be repaired for reuse with a specialized welding process. Induction heating is a cost-effective way to bring the blade tip up to welding temperature (typically1800°F) in just minutes.
While induction heating traditionally excels at selectively heating small areas with pinpoint accuracy, GH IA engineers have developed a compact induction heating vacuum furnace for whole part heat treating and brazing in a controlled atmosphere. This furnace provides an ideal environment for heating small lot sizes, parts of unusual shapes, and repairing "orphans" from other heating processes.
Traditionally, these processes have been run in a large batch vacuum furnace. But with an increasing emphasis on continuous flow / lean manufacturing, many companies are looking for an alternative to these fossil-fuel furnaces and their drawbacks – the large footprint, lack of quality control and poor efficiency of vacuum furnaces fly in the face of lean, continuous flow manufacturing requirements. Because long "soak" times are required to bring batch vacuum furnaces up to temperature, they are generally left on 24/7 whether in actual use or not. Not exactly a lean proposition!
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Induction heating is widely used to produce wind turbines.
Watch our YouTube video "Hardening Slewing Bearings."