Fixing things before they break
Johanna Weber spends most of her time looking at charts of vibration, temperature and oil pressure from 430 wind turbines, most of them standing in the North Sea. When a pattern looks wrong, her team sends a repair crew before a gearbox fails, which can save weeks of lost power and hundreds of thousands of euros.
Weber, who earned a master's in mechanical engineering at the Frankfurt Campus in 2015, now leads a 22-person reliability team at a European wind energy company.
Her team's work has reduced unplanned turbine shutdowns by about 30 percent since 2022, according to the company. The team uses machine learning models trained on years of maintenance records, but Weber insists that every alert is checked by an engineer before a crew is sent out.
Offshore, you can't just drive out and have a look. A boat and a crew cost a fortune, and the weather decides when you can go. Knowing a week early changes everything.
Back to campus
Weber's master's thesis, on detecting cracks in turbine blades from sound, was supervised by a Frankfurt Campus professor who still teaches there. She now co-teaches a guest module on predictive maintenance each spring and has hired seven Frankfurt Campus graduates.
Her advice to students is practical. "Learn statistics properly, and learn to explain it to a technician on a boat," she said. "Both matter."
Read more alumni stories on the Alumni Spotlight page.
She visits the campus each spring to speak to first-year students.
