Instrumentation Ready Gearbox

Currently failures of wind turbine gearboxes are not fully understood - with failures in some cases occurring at only 30% of the design load. The technology to gather data on the root causes of such failures has already been developed, however is currently not implemented on a large scale due to the costs of such a system. However, by implementing simple changes early in the gearbox design phase, the cost of the system can be substantially reduced - almost negligibly increasing the overall cost of a wind turbine gearbox, yet allowing remote condition monitoring of critical parameters. Implementing such a system would substantially reduce maintenance costs of wind turbines and allow the collection of critical information for future gearbox design.