Thermal analysis of rolling bearing at wind turbine gearbox high speed end

Bearing failure is one of the important gearbox failure modes of wind turbines, which is also the main issue to affect the wind turbine reliability. This paper studies thermal mechanism of a rolling bearing installed at a wind turbine gearbox high speed end, based on which a thermal network model is embedded into the wind turbine simulation. Dynamic thermal characteristic of this rolling bearing is studied under variable wind speed situation. ANSYS is used to calculate its three dimensional temperature distribution and different failures are introduced in the model. The result obtained in this paper is not only useful for bearing optimized design but also meaningful to future wind turbine condition monitoring system.