SIEMENS

When Xing Jianhui recently read that China plans to increase its wind energy capacity ten-fold to 100 GW by 2020, his thoughts turned not only to the many thousands of wind turbines that would soon be spinning on the North China steppe, but also to the extensive maintenance efforts the machines would one day require.
"Thinking like that is part of my job," says Xing, who has a PhD in engineering and works as a developer for the Automation and Switching Division at Siemens Corporate Technology China in Beijing. "After all, even the best systems eventually suffer from wear and tear." And in the case of wind turbines, which are continuously exposed to the elements, strain on materials and the resulting need for maintenance work is particularly great. "If a turbine suddenly breaks down, the cost of deploying a repair crane alone can easily amount to €10,000," explains Xing. That's why the turbines must be continuously monitored. But how is that possible, given the size of Chinese wind parks, which consist of hundreds or even thousands of turbines at remote locations in the countryside?

Minimizing Maintenance. The Chinese aren't the first people in the world to have tackled this problem, of course. Since the early days of wind turbines, maintenance has always been among the biggest challenges faced by operators. That's because it is essential to ensuring that wind energy can be used cost-effectively. Until recently, however, maintenance involved an expensive mix of manpower and sophisticated technology. To monitor the turbines, critical components are equipped with motion sensors, e.g. vibration sensors, that register irregularities and immediately notify a control center should they occur. In addition to accounting for several percentage points of the total cost of building a wind turbine, such technology requires that a team of highly skilled engineers evaluate operating data. On top of that, the sensors themselves need to be maintained.
"Turbine manufacturers are very concerned about this problem," says Xing. "Wind park operators are not only demanding very reliable systems with long warranty periods; they also want their wind parks to cost less in terms of maintenance, and they expect to be able to manage with personnel who have far less training than their Western counterparts." As Xing and his colleagues became aware of this situation, they began to look for a technology that would be better adapted to China's needs. They eventually found the solution right next to the parts that are subject to wear and tear — in the motor of the pitch system, which controls the angle of the rotor blades.
Siemens wind turbines do not use conventional motion sensors to monitor these critical components. Instead, highly sensitive sensors from the Simotion series are used. The electric voltages that these measure as a matter of course actually contain all of the information that the engineers require. "The system measures the electric currents flowing into the motors. If parts of the pitch system move differently from the way in which they are supposed to, the currents will show different patterns," explains Xing. "The measurements are so precise that we can create algorithms that target the wear and tear of individual components and make it recognizable." Doing so has made expensive motion sensors superfluous while at the same time improving functionality.
That's because changes in currents allow wear and tear to be detected earlier than was previously the case, and the software provides operators with specific information regarding which part has to be replaced, and when. As a result, maintenance and personnel costs can be substantially reduced, while capacity utilization and profitability can be markedly increased. "The manufacturers were surprised to see how simple the solution is," says Xing. Siemens signed a letter of intent with Goldwind, a major Chinese turbine manufacturer, for a trial use project in the Xinjiang province, where the first wind turbines to be equipped with the new technology will be put into operation this year. In view of the pace of development in China, it won't take long before the system is employed on a large scale.

SMART Researchers. Achieving this feat will not only be a breakthrough for the wind energy sector, but also for Siemens, because the new condition monitoring technology is one of the first innovations the company has developed in China for China. This did not happen by chance, however. Instead, it is part of Siemens' new development strategy, which is summarized by the acronym "SMART," which stands for simple, maintenance-friendly, affordable, reliable, and timely to market.
Although this development maxim does not apply exclusively to China, there aren't many other countries where high-tech companies like Siemens have a better opportunity to rethink tried-and-tested solutions. "Necessity is the mother of invention — and in China this necessity is enormous," says Dr. Arding Hsu, Head of Siemens Corporate Technology in China. "As a result, China's potential is no longer extraordinary just as a sales market, but also as a development location."
The modernization project currently under way in China — where approximately 40,000 employees of the Siemens business units generated sales of approximately €5 billion in 2008 — is probably the biggest in history. Everywhere you look, from the energy sector to the transport infrastructure and the healthcare system, the country is trying to create the basis for catching up with the industrialized nations of the West. And even though its successes have long been visible, the challenges are just as obvious.
While China's major cities have long since arrived in the 21st century, most of the country's regions are still deeply mired in the pre-industrial age. "You only need to take your car and drive for one hour out of Beijing to see how different the needs are within this country," says Hsu. "Our company wants to help China's development, so we have to adapt ourselves as best as possible to the country's wide range of needs."
Despite being so obvious, this approach is still completely new to most multinational corporations, which until now have primarily focused on supplying China with products that have been successful in other markets and are much better than anything new competitors inside China can produce. "Such a strategy works very well in many cases," says Hsu. "But developments in China do not always follow the same path as elsewhere; instead they can move in completely new directions." This is good, given that real progress can't be achieved by just copying known approaches. Although Hsu estimates that distinctly Chinese products and solutions make up barely more than 20 % of the total market, he believes, unlike representatives of many Western companies, that niches for locally-developed solutions have great potential. After all, many innovations have been born because developers looked for solutions beyond mainstream areas.
"In the 1970s, hardly anyone in the computer industry thought computers would one day be found in every household. Back then, you had to study for years at a university to learn how to navigate through programs by keyboard," says Hsu, who has a PhD in computer science and was among the industry's pioneers in Silicon Valley. "But Steve Jobs had an idea, and the rest is history."
Because it is very likely that some of the chapters in the history of technology will be written in China in the future, Siemens Corporate Technology has assembled a team of around 200 developers in Beijing and Shanghai. But instead of searching for the "next big thing" in laboratories, the researchers are taking a more down-to-earth route and are focusing on how to accelerate progress in areas where it is already under way. "For instance," says Hsu, "we are working closely with Siemens' business units to develop customized products for everyday use by customers, because the market provides you with the best sense of where developments are headed."

Counting Cars with Cell Phones. An example of a product designed to fit a distinctively Chinese situation is being pursued by Qiu Wei, manager of a SMART project in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. The project's title, "Recording Traffic Information for Megacities," may sound mundane — and it is — until you find out how the project achieves its goal, which is anything but mundane.
"China has dozens of cities with a million or more inhabitants, and handling the huge volume of traffic is one of the biggest challenges in terms of making those cities truly livable," says Qiu. Techniques for measuring the volume of traffic were introduced a long time ago to ensure, for example, that traffic light times could be optimally set. To make such measurements, researchers insert sensors into road surfaces or install cameras to record traffic flow. While such techniques are effective, the infrastructure they require makes them very expensive.
In the future it will be much easier to chart traffic volume using small auxiliary devices that hadn't even been thought of when the sensor plates and camera systems were initially developed. Those devices are cell phones. "Today almost every car has a cell phone that is continuously in contact with transmission masts," explains Qiu. "The positioning information provided by all those phones gives us all the data we need to make traffic measurements dynamically. And of course, the cell phone owners remain anonymous in this process."

Undreamed of Possibilities. The principle is very simple, but it takes sophisticated software to turn the location data from hundreds of thousands of cell phones into usable information that can be employed for a practical application in real time. To conduct the project, Qiu has teamed up with a Siemens business unit to work together with cell phone service provider China Mobile. "The telephone companies are very interested in this information because it would allow them to offer new types of services," Qiu says.
For example, it may prove possible to optimize directions given by automotive navigation systems through mobile phone networks or to allow cell phones to serve as GPS devices. Such developments are also of interest to the advertising industry, which could use them in the future to transmit location-specific shopping or restaurant tips.
Due to the rapidly-growing number of vehicles on Chinese streets, the project was put on a fast track and has developed rapidly since its inception in 2007. Indeed, the first marketable version of the application is scheduled to be completed this year.
But that is expected to be just the beginning of a far-reaching series of innovations. "Development is a process that never ends," says Hsu. "A product is good if it has the potential to be continuously improved." Siemens' developments in China are not makeshift solutions for an emerging market. They are technological innovations that will eventually be used in the most highly developed countries as well. That's true of wind turbines and traffic measurement systems alike. If that's not SMART, nothing is!