Pitch Bearing CMS: ecoPITCH
No noise, no costly surprises - know when your pitch bearings are at risk up to 6 months in advance.
Deploy permanent or temporary ecoPITCH in-hub wind turbine monitoring from just ½ day installation per turbine. Detect damage early, before it affects blade performance, safety or O&M budgets.
About
Pitch bearing faults don’t announce themselves until it’s expensive.
Failures in pitch bearings are often only discovered when it’s too late, typically when technicians hear unusual noises during turbine pitching.
By that point, issues such as raceway spalling or cage fractures have already progressed, leaving operators with little choice but to undertake urgent and costly replacements.
ecoPITCH provides continuous in-hub monitoring, even on bearings that are difficult to access and assess manually. It detects early-stage damage, including raceway spalling, cage fractures, seal displacement and more, with real-time diagnostics and automated alerts delivered via fleetMONITOR – so you can act before minor wear turns into major downtime.
Built to detect what others miss
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In-hub sensors monitoring vibration, displacement and RPM
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Early fault detection of spalling, cage fractures, and other critical damage
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Permanent and portable data acquisition options
- Data transmitted to fleetMONITOR via 4G for remote diagnostics and automated alerts
Over 1,500 turbine installs for Acciona, GE, Gamesa, Siemens, and more.
Benefits
Get in touch
Protect your O&M budget.
Book a demo with our pitch bearing experts to discuss how ecoPITCH can reduce your unplanned downtime.
Complete the enquiry form and one of our experts will be in touch.
VP, Advanced Sensing
ONYX Insight
Principal Engineer
ONYX Insight
Contact form
Insights
Latest guides, reports & webinars on pitch bearings
Resources & Support
The team
Meet your pitch bearing experts
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Dr. John Coultate
VP, Advanced Sensing
John leads the team responsible for hardware and sensor solutions in condition monitoring. He has been with ONYX - through its roots in Romax - since 2007 and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering.
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Jesse Graeter
Principal Engineer
Jesse entered wind in 2008 as a design engineer at GE followed by joining ONYX in 2013. His consultancy role includes instrumentation, failure investigations, monitoring R&D, and reliability engineering. He’s a licensed professional engineer with a degree in mechanical engineering.
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Aaron Lockton CEng
Principal Engineer, Advanced Sensing
Aaron specialises in developing high-reliability hardware systems for wind energy data acquisition and condition monitoring. With deep expertise in electronics, embedded Linux, and offshore turbine installations, he helps deploy advanced sensing solutions across global wind fleets.
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Dr. Robin Elliott
Principal Engineer, Data Analytics
Robin is responsible for working with owners and operators of onshore and offshore wind farms on the development and implementation of prognostic life models, reducing the cost of O&M and developing risk mitigating solutions.
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Dr. John Coultate
VP, Advanced Sensing
John leads the team responsible for hardware and sensor solutions in condition monitoring. He has been with ONYX - through its roots in Romax - since 2007 and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering.
-
Jesse Graeter
Principal Engineer
Jesse entered wind in 2008 as a design engineer at GE followed by joining ONYX in 2013. His consultancy role includes instrumentation, failure investigations, monitoring R&D, and reliability engineering. He’s a licensed professional engineer with a degree in mechanical engineering.
-
Aaron Lockton CEng
Principal Engineer, Advanced Sensing
Aaron specialises in developing high-reliability hardware systems for wind energy data acquisition and condition monitoring. With deep expertise in electronics, embedded Linux, and offshore turbine installations, he helps deploy advanced sensing solutions across global wind fleets.
-
Dr. Robin Elliott
Principal Engineer, Data Analytics
Robin is responsible for working with owners and operators of onshore and offshore wind farms on the development and implementation of prognostic life models, reducing the cost of O&M and developing risk mitigating solutions.
FAQs
Have a question? Find an answer.
Why monitor wind turbine pitch bearings?
Pitch bearings connect the rotor hub to the blades, and in modern wind turbines suffer from many cycles of load and stress due to their high loads and variable operating conditions. Common causes of failures can include ellipse truncation, cage wear, and surface fatigue, quality issues from poor induction hardening, and cracks originating at stress concentrations. In the worst cases, blades can be lost.
How can you mitigate the risk of pitch bearing failures on wind turbines?
Based on our award-winning ecoCMS sensor solutions, we have created a new technology for assessing and comparing damage on any pitch bearing, regardless of turbine type. Now the technology is available to monitor pitch bearings effectively in real-time, revolutionising your wind turbine predictive maintenance approach.
What ways can you monitor pitch bearings?
Visual Inspections
Traditionally, owners and operators have used visual inspection methods to monitor the healths and their pitch bearings and blades. This will usually involve engineers climbing the tower in order to carry out the visual inspection.
Permanent Monitoring
Using a permanently installed sensor technology (such as ecoPITCH), wind turbine operators get a full, holistic view of the health of their pitch bearings. This means that they can monitor the health of their entire fleet of pitch bearings without having to send engineers up-tower.
Portable Health Sweeps
Using the same ecoPITCH technology, ONYX Insight can carry out a snapshot health check of your pitch bearing health, which is delivered in a report to you. This gives you the actionable insights you need to ensure you are maintaining optimal asset health.
What options do I have when deploying ecoPITCH?
Temporary Instrumentation
Do you need a one-off pitch bearing health assessment for an end-of-warranty inspection campaign? No problem – ONYX offers temporary instrumentation and data analysis services to give you the actionable insights that you need.
Permanent Online Monitoring
Do you need a permanent solution to continuously monitor a serial problem across your fleet? No problem – ONYX’s ecoPITCH is the best-in-class solution for pitch bearing monitoring, giving you the confidence to keep running your turbines without unexpected failures.
Monitor your entire fleet’s health from a single platform. Effortlessly.
Get the data you need to make decisions with confidence – all from a single front-end system. Less hassle, better results.
