Romax announces the future of predictive maintenance with its fully integrated InSight Health Management Platform – a suite of products and services for the wind industry.

The InSight Platform launch will take place at the AWEA WINDPOWER exhibition and conference in US on May 6th, 2013 and follows on from the launch of its software in April 2012 to include health monitoring services for a full lifecycle management approach.

InSight leverages Romax’s work over the last two decades in drivetrain design, analysis, monitoring and operations and maintenance technical services for onshore and offshore wind farms.

At present, there are many data sources and analytical capabilities, available to monitor different aspects of the drivetrain such as the gearbox and bearings for conditions such as vibration, oil analysis, wind direction and temperature. Romax’s world-leading software and services allow a combination of multi-source data to be unified on a single intuitive software platform. When combined with engineering consultancy and turbine maintenance services to ensure optimum turbine reliability and health, Romax provides maximum flexibility and helps mitigates risk.

This launch signifies the continuous development of InSight in response to an increasing industry need to monitor more than just the drivetrain. This means that failures will be detected up to six months in advance, allowing for preventative correction, rather than a costly, complete deterioration of the components.

Based on over two decades of operating in the industry, Romax has recognized a trend in the phases of wind farm health management maturity and has loosely segmented these phases into three groups – “fire-fighting”, “managed” and “predictive.” The InSight solution enables wind farm owners and operators to evolve from ‘fire-fighting’ through to managed and ultimately to an optimum state of predictive maintenance. The benefits of this are that operating costs are significantly reduced, maintenance and investment planning improved and revenue and energy generation is increased.

The InSight products and services have been active on a number of wind farms around the world with notable benefits.

“Romax Technology has been working with us on the installation of Condition Monitoring hardware at our Bankend Rig site in South Lanarkshire, UK as part of a five year contract to monitor the performance of the wind farm’s 11 Siemens 1.3 MW turbines.

“The Romax solution was selected because we believe that the InSight suite of predictive maintenance tools offers a way to greatly enhance the management of our fleet. The innovative suite of products and services offers advanced and intuitive collation of CMS data into a single dashboard allowing us and Romax to accurately view turbine health.

“We have found their team of engineers responsive and friendly, but more importantly, they offer an unrivalled expertise to allow us to reduce turbine downtime and as a result improve our profitability.”

Wilson Renewables
Dr Peter Poon, CEO at Romax Technology said: “This latest version of the InSight software combined with our engineering service team will change the way you view your turbine’s health. We are expanding the value and breadth of knowledge we can provide to our customers through an advanced and integrated system approach that works openly with your existing systems.  With our expert engineering knowledge and visibility of turbine health, we can recognise warning signs early enough to reduce downtime, and costs to optimise reliability. At Romax, we believe the future is the prioritised and predictive maintenance and inspections of wind turbines. We’re not just thinking about diagnosis but prognosis in aiming to see the future of wind turbine health, the vision is optimum reliability and limited downtime, a vision we hope will be adopted by all.”

The InSight technology has also had recent success in a new patent achievement for Romax in operating data for Condition Monitoring Systems.

source: Romax