Machinery & Reliability Industrial Consultant. Unconventional Solutions to Machinery Failure; Finding The Failure Mice. All Opinions are the authors personal opinions.
Modern Mechanical Engineers: "Let us optimise the design of machinery & Equipment with minimum factors of safety to minimize costs; we can succeed because we have modern Finite Element design software." Reliability Specialist: "Your are failing in this philosophy. Learn from the earlier engineers of the past 100 years of Mechanical Engineering who added large safety factors to all machine components both static and rotating. No less than FS=2.0" Loss of Tension is highly tied to original joint design, and of course original preload of fasteners. Many possible design contributors to the failure in the video are typical in such failures: 1- Undersized flange thickness. 2- Undersized bolt diameters gives reduced joint preload. 3- Using M12.9 rating Fasteners. Not reliable. 4- Not specifying exact quality requirements for the Bolts & Nuts regarding mettalurgy. Some Bolts in Industry come from low cost, low quality sources. 5- Bolt holes excessive gap to bolt shanks. Lack of thick, hardened steel washers. 6- Lack of Nut Locking. 7- Lack of proper joint flange flatness and smoothness requirements. 8- Fatigue resistance of joint is not built-in by design. It is subjected to Joint flange deformation at high winds. 9- Flanged joint design of this very critical application must include a proven method of accurately knowing the bolted members actual preload at installation, to within 15% error maximum. Not the turn of nut methods and other primitive solutions. Maintenance function is not to solve Equipment Design defects; it is there to provide a Quality Preventive Maintenance function at reasonable cost, and at wide time intervals.
Wind Turbine Failure in Spain at El Gallego Station #windenergy #windturbines #mechanicalengineering #structuresfalls Video credit : •Myri y Ángel Técnicos Verticales
Senior Advisor
8moNo plastic deformation in the failing tower flange connection points to loose bolts and/or fatigue in bolts, due to loss of or too little pretension, not due to wrong design.