Tailwind in China for SKF

Located in Beijing, Guohua Energy Investment Co. Ltd, is a major corporation within China focusing primarily on investing and exploiting wind power as a renewable energy source.

In planning new wind farms, Guohua wanted a partner able to deliver reliable monitoring services. SKF won a significant order to supply Guohua with SKF WindCon online condition monitoring systems and other related services for three of the company's planned wind farms.

Guohua were impressed by SKF's well-defined remote diagnostic processes that have been developed over the years in Germany, where SKF today monitors close to 600 wind turbines.

A typical wind turbine has a service life of around 20 years. During this time it isn't a question of "if" service is needed as much as "when". By installing a SKF WindCon system, operating costs are reduced, with lower total cost of ownership and less unexpected downtime being the main benefits.

Instead of running arbitrary maintenance schedules, SKF WindCon enables maintenance decisions based on actual machine conditions, providing the opportunity to perform necessary inspection and repair work during planned turbine stops.

The system enables condition monitoring on an unlimited number of turbines and turbine data points. Sensors and software combine to continuously monitor and track many operating conditions, such as unbalanced rotor blades, misalignment, bearing condition, gear damage, tower and blade vibration and electrical problems.

About SKF:

SKF is a leading global supplier in the areas of bearings, seals, mechatronics, services and lubrication systems. The Group's service offer includes technical support, maintenance services, engineering consultancy and training. SKF is represented in more than 130 countries and has 15,000 distributor locations worldwide. The Group's annual sales 2008 were SEK 63,361 million. The number of employees was 44,799.

In China, SKF has 11 manufacturing units, two solution factories for service and an SKF College. The total number of employees in SKF China is more than 4,000.