Numerical simulation of ring creep on a wind turbine main shaft

A novel high-fidelity FEM modeling approach is developed to simulate the micro-motion in the main bearing assembly of a wind turbine (WT) drive train. This model will not only simulate the rolling bearing itself but also the stiffness of the neighboring structure, as this is mandatory to simulate the ring migration effect realistically. Due to the size of the components and the bearings on the one hand and the scale of the micro-movements resulting in ring creep on the other hand, there are some challenges, e.g. the model needs to be fine enough to fully capture the non-linearity in the bearing, but it should also remain calculable with basic computer equipment. For that purpose, state-of-the-art bearing modeling is combined with the submodeling technique. So ring creep can be calculated in a smart way on usual computer hardware.