Modeling, Simulation and Analysis of Wind-Turbine Gear Train

Design of gearbox plays an important role in wind turbine gear train. The paper involves deriving a mathematical model for a wind-turbine gearbox using Lagrange’s mechanics, which considers the kinetic and the potential energies of the system. The equation of motions derived from the mathematical model run on MATLAB is used to extract the natural frequencies and mode shapes. The gearbox parameters referred in this paper are the parameters of the NREL 5 MW wind turbine which is a 3-stage planetary gearbox consisting of a low-speed planetary stage (three similar planets with helix teeth, sun and fixed ring) and two stages consisting of high-speed helical gear pairs. The output values obtained from MATLAB are numerically validated by modeling the gearbox and conducting modal analysis using ANSYS.