Sensitivity Analysis on the Reliability of an Offshore Winch Regarding Selected Gearbox Parameters

• Main Authors: Lothar Wöll, Achim Feldermann, Georg Jacobs
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Norwegian Society of Automatic Control 2017-04-01
• Series: Modeling, Identification and Control
• Subjects: Reliability; Sensitivity Analysis; Offshore Gearbox; Active Heave Compensation
• Online Access: http://www.mic-journal.no/PDF/2017/MIC-2017-2-1.pdf

To match the high expectations and demands of customers for long-lasting machines, the development of reliable products is crucial. Furthermore, for reasons of competitiveness, it is necessary to know the future product lifetime as accurately as possible to avoid over-dimensioning. Additionally, a more detailed system understanding enables the designer to influence the life expectancy of the product without performing an extensive amount of expensive and time-consuming tests. In early development stages of new equipment only very basic information about the future system design, like the ratio or the system structure, is available. Nevertheless, a reliable lifetime prediction of the system components and subsequently of the system itself is necessary to evaluate possible design alternatives and to identify critical components beforehand. Lifetime predictions, however, require many parameters, which are often not known in these early stages. Therefore, this paper performs a sensitivity analysis on the drivetrain of an offshore winch with active heave compensation for two typical load cases. The influences of the parameters gear center distance and ambient temperature are investigated by varying the parameters within typical ranges and evaluating the quantitative effect on the lifetime.