ZF Wind Power launches new generation SHIFT

Launched nearly nine years ago, ZF Wind Power’s SHIFT modular gearbox concept enhanced turbine design flexibility, reduced time-to-market, and cut costs. Currently, with almost 50 GW shipped, SHIFT demonstrates global competitiveness and adaptability across various classes, geographical regions and market segments. Covering onshore and part of the offshore wind segments with four main platform variants, SHIFT’s flexibility and reliability are industry-leading.

SHIFT answers the market dynamics

SHIFT anticipates market evolution by developing powerful, modular platforms that offer high flexibility and performance, helping partners stay competitive in their markets. The new generation SHIFT elevates modularity and adaptability to a new level while covering market versatility:

• Tonality-sensitive markets focus on the quality of NVH characteristics of the wind turbine’s performance, such as sound or vibration levels.
• Capacity factor driven markets prioritize the ability to meet high performance demand maximizing delivery of wind energy, ensuring more robust energy infrastructure and scalability.

Capex-oriented markets emphasize the need for cost-competitive wind infrastructure to achieve lower cost of energy to enhance long-term growth of energy production supporting economic competitiveness.
 

“Whether the market is tonality-sensitive, capacity factor driven and/or capex-oriented, the new level modularity of SHIFT building blocks and technology offer a flexible choice in components to fit these requirements,” explains Felix Henseler, CEO of ZF Wind Power.

SHIFT-ing towards the future by building on the proven basis of the platform

All components benefit from ZF’s expertise and validated designs, guaranteeing high reliability. Leveraging extensive experience and insights from the installed base, the new generation SHIFT has enhanced its modular design for greater flexibility and competitiveness while maintaining its core characteristics of high performance, reliability and cost-competitiveness.

Maximal performance:

• Enhanced modularity allows optimization for power or cost competitiveness, covering more markets and customer demands.
• Flexible upgradability increases the torque range for SHIFT 4k new generation from 4000-5500 kNm to 4000-5900 kNm.

Industry-leading reliability:

• Gradual implementation of new technologies with controlled risk management, supported by combined resources and validation efforts across all SHIFT platforms, with almost 50 GW in operation.
   

Improved competitiveness:

• Industrial standardization achieves volume efficiencies in design, validation, production, and service.
• Shorter time-to-market through unified SHIFT technology, which accelerates readiness across platform variants and speeds up the validation process, enabling faster access to new markets.

???????“SHIFT is now even more versatile, combining design flexibility, modularity and competitiveness which can be deployed in a wide range of wind turbines covering existing and new markets,” summarizes Martin Knops, CTO of ZF Wind Power.

SHIFT 4k – The first of the new generation SHIFT

ZF now introduces the new generation SHIFT 4k to the market. The new platform variant is designed to cover an impressive torque range from 4000 to 5900 kNm, ensuring robust performance across various applications. Additionally, it delivers a turbine output ranging from 3.6 to 5.6 MW, with gear ratios reaching up to 190. This advancement marks a significant leap in our technology, providing enhanced efficiency and reliability for our partners. They now have the choice of a modular expandable platform for existing or new turbine variants or a highly competitive compact platform, both building on validated and reliable SHIFT technologies. The new generation SHIFT 4k has been selected by wind turbine OEMs to build new generation products that appeal multiple markets and regions incl. the United States of America, India and newly developing wind markets.

Empowering a sustainable future together with SHIFT, the technology DNA for the future

The development of the new generation SHIFT took place in close System Co*operation with partners. “During the design phase we developed a new level of modularization. This optimizes the reuse of building blocks, enhances configurations and drives standardization at component level while increasing interchangeability in designs, with a focus on reducing development, production and evaluation time,” explains Martin Knops. This means that ZF can guarantee a shorter time to market at a lower cost with the potential for future upgrades of turbine designs. Now, with the newest technology ZF can offer its partners even more flexibility. As every market is different, every partner might rethink the setup of their business: opting for resized and cost-optimized versus upgraded, more powerful versions, or offer a turbine tuned for tonality-sensitive markets.

“New technology implementations make SHIFT the most versatile wind gearbox platform on the market now covering torque ranges from 3000 to 8000 kNm. The strength of SHIFT’s DNA and the new technology enable us to empower a sustainable future together with our partners,” concludes Felix Henseler.

*All are values calculated for onshore at 80 m/s tip speed.