Since two and a half years the experts in control and automation engineering know the OAT GmbH from Kirchlengern/Germany. The engineering-team around Dipl. Ing. Henry G. Osterholz with their long-time experience had developed the current state-of-the-art and most innovative electrical pitch system for wind turbines. At the moment this PCS-system demonstrates its absolute efficiency by operation at national and international locations before in spring 2008 a large serial order will be provided.

The one who read the OAT-brochures and the homepage exactly will have noticed that OAT wants more than only “pitch”. “Automation for Wind Turbines” or “Turbine Motion Control” can be read several times. Now we took a great step forward to this aim. After many substantial enquiries and also many discussions the time has come: OAT makes the next steps towards the complete automation of a wind turbine in collaboration with experienced partners.

More and more experts come to the conclusion that the automation of the very complex wind turbines should be operated on a homogeneous and continuous hardware platform. They don`t want such complicated controls like many applications at present. The combination of the components of different manufacturers often is very complicate. So developer and service team can get significant problems by assembling the components.

Of course these days every control should be compatible to other systems to afford the “Second-Source-Strategy” of the wind turbine manufacturers also in the control-range as far as possible.

Programming according to IEC 61131-3 with the well known CoDeSys-Tools is absolutely necessary. The “Safety Control” becomes more and more important and comes to the fore.

The experts of OAT know that problems. Now they found a very competent partner. In common they will find the right solutions for all this automation problems. This can be a simple hardware platform up to substantial software solutions and on-site support – worldwide and individual – at customer`s option.

A speciality is that OAT is supported by a famous university. This university is specialized on simulation models for optimizing the drive train and the grid connection of wind turbines. With software tools like for example MATLAB- Simulink simulation results can be directly incorporated by development of control software. The outcome of this is an important simplification of the whole development phase and later on the starting-up.

All together we work as a trio and this trio will make waves in the windscene in the future.

The official presentation of this “Automation Network” is at the important windfair HusumWind 2007 in Husum/Germany. The involved partners on the OAT-stand are looking forward to lively discussions with the interested visitors.