ZF Wind Power is a globally established designer, manufacturer, and supplier of tailor-made gearboxes for wind turbines. The new business unit of the ZF Group is the result of a successful integration between two technology leaders. The merger between ZF, one of the world’s leading automotive industry suppliers, and the former Hansen Transmissions, one of the global leaders in wind turbine gearboxes, is propelled by a combination of experience, expertise, efficient production, and innovation.

ZF Wind Power currently operates four state-of-the-art manufacturing plants with an annual output capacity of approximately 10,000 MW. It leaves a global footprint with manufacturing presence in Europe, India, China and the US as well as worldwide sales and service operations. Strong R&D operations and partnerships are the backup of ZF to maintain its technological leadership.

As a leading worldwide automotive supplier for Driveline and Chassis Technology ZF can look back over 100 years of experience in developing and building transmissions. The combination with more than 30 years of experience of former Hansen in wind energy and overall almost 90 years of experience in transmissions for all kinds of industrial applications makes ZF Wind Power unbeatable. Literally two centuries of experience are combined through ZF and Hansen Transmissions. The designated expertise enables the company to supply major manufacturers of gear driven wind turbines with gearboxes ranging from 1.5 to 6.15 MW power capacity.

Custom-built solutions

The prevailing trend within the wind industry towards more powerful, reliable and available turbines in challenging operating conditions requires far-reaching customization of all vital components. Gearboxes are therefore co-designed, co-developed and custom-built to specific requirements of customers worldwide. Furthermore, all manufacturing activities are performed in-house. ZF thus ensures maximum control over quality and at the same time provides a high level of flexibility.

Over three decades of know-how in the wind industry and long-term partnerships with most of the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturers and operators have enabled ZF Wind Power to address any challenge put to them by their clients. The need for high efficiency, reliability, extended longevity, higher-capacity, and yet compact gearboxes is our motivation. We achieved to optimize the power to weight ratio and the energy yield of wind power gearboxes. This helps to bring down overall lifetime costs and optimizes economic payback period for wind power investments. Embedded in a dense network of fast and global service solutions, ZF Wind Power is ready to make a difference.

Role in MareWint

ZF Wind Power will contribute to the project by taking part in the following activities:

• defining and hosting short duration secondment opportunities for the network researchers, allowing them to execute a well defined application study case related to their research training,
• for the purpose of the model validation, identifying and providing industrial application cases for the researchers hosted by the network partners, involving available models and test data,
• expressing industrial needs, context and motivation for the research objectives and program, and
• definition of skill requirements for the involved researchers, on technology as well as general skills level.