Allen Hall and Joel Saxum talk with Cory Mittleider from Malloy Wind about the complex world of wind turbine main bearings. Cory breaks down why traditional bearing coatings are failing in newer turbine models and explores how electrical discharge, material choices, and monitoring systems play crucial roles in solving these costly failures. Dive into the technical challenges of detecting problems in these massive, slow-moving components and learn what operators should do during warranty periods to prepare for long-term maintenance.

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Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators.

Allen Hall: This is the progress powering tomorrow. I'm your host, Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're tackling a critical issue that's affecting wind farm operators across the industry, main bearing failures and the evolving solutions to combat them.

Joining us is Cory Mittleider business unit manager at Malloy Wind, who brings over 15 years of hands on experience in power transmission and bearing technology. Cory has built his career at Malloy Electric where he's become their go to expert for complex bearing challenges. His journey from technical sales support engineer to wind business unit manager has given him a unique perspective on the evolution of bearing technology and the real world challenges faced by wind farm operators.

Malloy Wind, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has been at the forefront of developing solutions for wind turbine bearing issues, particularly focusing on advanced materials. and designs to combat common failure modes like peeling damage and premature wear. Cory, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.

Thanks for having me. You are our go to guy for Anything bearing related. And as Joel and I travel around the United States this summer, we ran into a lot of people with bearing issues and now main bearing issues. And we've seen quite a bit in the press this summer about main bearings and coatings on main bearings and what is the right kind of main bearing to use and a lot of operators looking at different solutions at the minute, and we figured.

Cory will know. So let's just ask Cory what his thoughts were on main bearings and try to get a sense of what can be done.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah. We've definitely spent a lot of time looking into main bearings, main bearing failures.

Joel Saxum: So let's dive into this, Cory, then what is the. Just for our users or users, for our listeners can you give us the rundown basically of what the main bearing is, where it sits in the turbine and what it does?

Cory Mittleider: On the wind turbine drivetrain, you've got the blades and the rotor hanging out front, and then ultimately that's connected to a shaft. Which then connects it to the gearbox and the generator. And on that shaft, that's what we'll call the main shaft. On that shaft, there is a really big pillow block.

And it's got the main bearing inside. So we'll call it the main bearing, the main shaft bearing, a couple of different nomenclatures there. But that's what helps support that load of this very heavy drive train, but also connect it and allow the rotation to generate the power from the turbine. Some turbines do have two.

main bearings on this main shaft.