What is your role with Kapp Niles?
I work with the technology development department at Kapp Niles. Kapp Niles has a long history as machine tool manufacturer for gear-grinding machines. With our generating grinding machines, we focus more on the high-productive manufacturing of smaller gears, such as gears for the automotive industry. For larger internal and external gears, we provide high-precision profile grinding machines. With our technology development department, we collect and ideally anticipate our customers’ requirements and then derive and develop technological solutions for our grinding machines. We then test these and support our customers to work with them in order to better fulfill their requirements.
Kapp Niles has offered tailor-made products used in wind turbines for three decades now. How will you increase your focus on that sector?
We develop and supply our customers with grinding machines that they use to manufacture gears for wind-turbine gearboxes. In this role, we are directly confronted with the requirements that challenge our customers. In case of the wind-power industry, we have observed rapidly changing requirements in the past years as the global energy transition has progressed in a remarkable pace. And, regarding the wind power industry: In comparison to most other industries that manufacture big gears, it’s somewhat unique as they manufacture high quantities of the same or similar gear geometries. Most other customers producing large gears need to be very flexible as they usually only process a few of the same gears and then reconfigure their production. In this context, there is a lot of potential for the wind-power industry when it comes to automation, grinding productivity, optimization of manufacturing parameters, tool selection, etc. With this in mind, we focus on new solutions and powerful tools for our customers in the wind-power industry for a more effective production process, which is why we decided to focus more on those solutions and more on the sector.
What about the wind-energy sector made Kapp Niles feel it was an important industry in which to increase that focus?
There are a couple of factors: We want to concentrate strategically on future technologies. For example, we have already started focusing quite heavily on electromobility. And in that sense, if you focus on technologies for green mobility, you also need to have green electricity in mind. We benefit from already having a long history in the wind-power sector. The beforementioned changes in requirements that we see within the wind-power industry are twofold:
On the one hand, the wind industry has ambitious goals in terms of new capacity additions. If we aim to reach the goals defined within the Paris Agreement, it means that the production chains within the wind industry are required to be way more productive and generate more output. Thus, one big change of requirement that we see in gearbox production concerns productivity and cost.
On the other hand, it’s not only the higher demand for quantity itself, but we see the wind turbines also getting bigger. Developments of new wind turbines go beyond the 20-MW mark, so torque density and power density of the gearbox need to improve as the size of the gearboxes cannot be proportionally increased due to size and weight restrictions of the nacelle. Increasing the torque density often comes at least partially down to improving the quality of the ground gears. That’s the challenge for us: to combine a more productive grinding process with a more quality output.
What parts of a wind turbine are your machines
used for?
With our machines, our customers can grind and measure the relevant gears in a modern wind turbine with high precision. Most in focus are the gears within the main gearbox of the turbine. These are typically multi-stage planetary gearboxes that include the ring gears, the sun gears, as well as the planetary gears.
As the number of planetary gears and the number of gear stages have increased in the last few years, there’s more for our machines to do. Alongside the rise of nominal power output of wind turbines, the moduli and widths of the used gears have increased.
That means our grinding machines must facilitate larger workpiece weights and diameter. This is especially true for the ring gears that reach outer diameters of up to two or three meters. Being able to grind gears of those dimensions with high quality is often a valuable competitive advantage for our customers. Additionally, and by no means neglectable, are the pinions that help rotate the nacelle and the rotor blades.
What solutions does Kapp Niles offer when it comes to your wind-power customers?
For the external gears such as the pinions, the sun gears as well as the planetary gears needed within wind turbines, our KNG master and ZP profile grinding machines offer ideal prerequisites for a highly productive and high-quality manufacturing process.
For internal gears with a diameter of up to 5,000 mm, the ZPI series machines are available. While these machines are each based on a mature concept and have been well tested, we refined them comprehensively within the last years with the demands of different industries such as the wind-power sector in mind. In this context, it’s very important for us to collaborate closely when refining our machine concepts and developing new solutions.
One of our latest solutions is, for example, an automatic tool changing system for our KNG master and ZP machines. That’s one step toward combining a more productive process with one that delivers higher quality, as it can provide a perfect grinding tool for each of the grinding steps. For the beginning of the grinding process, you can use a tool that grinds very productively, and in the end, you can select a fine grinding tool that produces a very high surface finish quality, thus combining high productivity and high quality.
We work a lot on our 5-axis interpolated grinding that is required to produce big geometrical modifications to the gear’s flank, which is increasing in size due to the large torques transmitted by the gears. As they, for example, deform and deflect within the transmission, you want to optimize the contact pattern of the teeth and avoid any contact to the edges of the gears, so the gears have heavy modifications.
To produce that, optimal grinding paths are numerically calculated along the gear’s width. These paths can be simulated in advance to ensure a suitable grinding result. This is a good example for a shift from mechanical engineering tasks to mathematics and software development within the machine tool industry.
Alongside the grinding process itself, it has been very helpful that we understand ourselves as a system supplier as we also provide tools and measuring machines for the ground gear wheels. It has proven to be much easier to optimize the grinding process when you can coordinate tool design, machine tool as well as the subsequent measuring process.
How does the impact on the global energy transition affect Kapp Niles’ products?
Mostly it involves the changing requirements. Our customers are required to adopt new technological solutions in order to be price competitive and have a cost-efficient production to keep up the pace in this industry. This is intensified by a very globalized market within the wind-power industry. Our customers originate from all over the world, and their requirements are always a bit different. Our customers in Europe, for example, ask a few different questions and demand a few different solutions than our customers in Asia, which can be a challenge.
Furthermore, the global political situation can be challenging: especially, if we consider the tendency toward more trade restrictions in conjunction with a volatile economic situation that varies across the globe. As wind farms are usually big investment projects, volatile economic conditions tend to have a strong impact on them and lead to hesitations throughout such projects. As a machine tool manufacturer, we are typically affected by those hesitations very quickly as the industry tends to wait regarding the investment in new production resources in case of uncertainties.
How do you address those situations?
We have established production sites and service branches with experienced staff, for example, in North America and China. In this way, many of the questions and challenges our customers face can directly be addressed to our colleagues abroad.
We have noticed that, as the manufacturing processes and the grinding machines and technologies get more and more complex, the communication gets also more complex. Having local people talking to our customers and understanding their problems tremendously helps in understanding their challenges and identifying helpful new solutions for them.
What kind of reaction do you expect from the industry with Kapp Niles’ increased focus on wind energy?
As we bring any innovations to the market, our customers all around the world are eager on trying them out to see if they help their production become more cost-effective or to produce a higher quality. It can be a bit of a challenge to identify those solutions in advance, which is why we try to stay in close contact with customers in the industry to identify those solutions and challenges quickly.
More info: www.kapp-niles.com/en/campaign/wind-power
