Gamesa has celebrated the fifth edition of its Patents and Inventors Competition, which is designed to acknowledge its employees’ efforts to develop innovative new technology. This year's prize has gone to a rotor positioning invention for which the patent application has already been filed.
The invention is the brainchild of Ignacio Fernández Romero and Eugenio Plano Morillo, two engineers that currently work for Adwen, the offshore wind joint venture set up by Gamesa and Areva. The rotor positioning system consists of an application that enables automatic turbine rotor blocking or their placement at certain angles, as opposed to manual positioning at present. This application permits the generator-converter to work as an engine, instead of generating power, in order to facilitate certain tasks, including operations and maintenance work, onshore and offshore, as well as the calibration of certain sensors. This feature also allows more efficient blade sensor calibration for which very precise azimuth positioning is required.