Knoxville, TN Company creates device to help windmill making
Wednesday February 03, 2010
Inventure Laboratories has developed a piece of equipment...
Tennessee may not be a mecca for wind power generation, but one local engineering firm will have a hand in how future turbines dotting plains and hills across the country are built.
Inventure Laboratories has developed a piece of equipment aimed at simplifying and reducing the cost of manufacturing the giant bearings that help guide windmills to take advantage of nature's breezes.
The Knoxville company, consisting of a couple of engineers, a couple of office personnel and owner Mike Carroll, was hired by Banyan Global Technologies, a South Carolina business focused on design, consulting and sales in the gear-making industry, to build the machine for a customer getting into the business.
In a wind turbine, bearings help control the pitch of the blades and direction of the turbine itself as it turns into the wind. They look just like gears that are commonplace in any number of industrial uses - cars, planes, farm equipment - except that they are huge. One of the gears, eight feet in diameter and weighing about one-and-a-half tons, lay on shop floor where Inventure was demonstrating the new product to its customers.
"As you look at the rapid expansion (of the wind industry) ... there was definitely a shortage of machinery to make these bearings," said Darryl Witte, vice president of sales for Banyan.
The current manufacturing method involves a $500,000 piece of equipment that requires the bearing be lifted into place and each tooth in the gear is machined by hand, Witte said. Depending on the size of the bearing, the process can take two to 10 hours, he said.
Inventure's machine, on the other hand, is a much smaller piece of equipment that sits atop the bearing-to-be and machines it automatically. By changing out a couple of components, customers then can transform the machine into an inspection device to check for flaws in the finished product.
"These machines bring the machine to the gear instead of the gear to the machine," said John McCracken, partner and engineer with Inventure who, Witte said, "took my idea and made it better."
The equipment will cost $70,000-$80,000 for the basic version, $100,000-$110,000 with the inspection capability added on, Witte said, and the machining process will be cut to 15-20 minutes.
"We've just diminished the whole thing in a really nice tight package with the development of this tool," Witte said. In addition to reducing the capital investment for customers, he said, they will save money on labor and achieve the added benefit of a higher quality product. After putting the new equipment through its paces at its current customer's site, Banyan will begin selling the piece of equipment to other customers, first in the U.S. and then internationally.
"All the manufacturers that are in this market ... want to differentiate themselves from somebody else," he said.
That said, the recent economic downturn has put a damper on the wind power industry, which was growing at breakneck pace a couple of years ago.
"For right now in the domestic market we're hopeful to sell four to 12 pieces in the next 48 months," he said. "The ramp up of wind has plateaued a little bit. I've talked to three people that want to buy right now" but can't because of market conditions.
Still, the development of such machines demonstrates the evolution of the wind industry from a one-at-a-time manufacturing process for turbine components to full-fledged mass production requiring more automated processes as wind farms sprout up across the country and around the world, Witte said.
And while geography and politics will likely keep wind turbines from marking Tennessee's landscape, Inventure principals hope the peripheral benefits of the industry will be felt here for a long time to come.
Source: Knoxville News Sentinel
