Wind Power Generator Monitor and Control

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to make electrical power or windmills for mechanical power.

The UEIPAC from United Electronic Industries (UEI) is an ideal solution for monitoring and controlling wind power generators, powerful enough to provide control for everything from blade angle to output voltage and log everything from wind speed to power output.

The UEIPAC’s easy access to Ethernet means it can easily run as a slave to a primary host PC when desired, but can take over and run stand-alone if anything happens to the primary communications link. It's very easy to set up - build your application on a Linux PC, or a Windows PC using Cygwin, and once developed, compile your code and download it to the UEIPAC. From there it can run fully stand-alone, or you can keep it on your network to provide updates to your host.

The Cube’s rugged environmental spec eliminates the need for any heating or cooling in the control rack. The standard UEIPAC cubes are tested from -40° to +85° C, at 100 g shock, 5 g vibration and altitudes up to 120,000 feet and are tough enough for the most challenging applications. All I/O is fully isolated from the controller so the UEIPAC is largely immune to the glitches and spikes so commonly seen in the grounds of an industrial environment.

In more complex applications, we have customers running very complex vibration analysis to identify degradation in bearings, transmissions and turbines. This data can then be correlated with other information acquired allowing the implementation of a very powerful predictive maintenance program.

We also have a number of customers who use UEI’s Cubes and RACKtangles as remote communications links. Applications for remote serial communications include wind farms where the system needs to consolidate RS-485 data from a series of turbines and send the data to the supervisory computer.

For more information on the UEIPAC or any of the UEI products please contact the Sarsen team on +44 1672 511166 or email us - info@sarsen.net