A Study of Wind Turbine Performance Decline with Age through Operation Data Analysis

Abstract

Ageing of technical systems and machines is a matter of fact. It therefore does not come as a surprise that an energy conversion system such as a wind turbine, which in particular operates under non-stationary conditions, is subjected to performance decline with age. The present study presents an analysis of the performance deterioration with age of a Vestas V52 wind turbine, installed in 2005 at the Dundalk Institute of Technology campus in Ireland. The wind turbine has operated from October 2005 to October 2018 with its original gearbox, that has subsequently been replaced in 2019. Therefore, a key point of the present study is that operation data spanning over thirteen years have been analysed for estimating how the performance degrades in time. To this end, one of the most innovative approaches for wind turbine performance control and monitoring has been employed: a multivariate Support Vector Regression with Gaussian Kernel, whose target is the power output of the wind turbine. Once the model has been trained with a reference data set, the performance degradation is assessed by studying how the residuals between model estimates and measurements evolve. Furthermore, a power curve analysis through the binning method has been performed to estimate the Annual Energy Production variations and suggests that the most convenient strategy for the test case wind turbine (running the gearbox until its end of life) has indeed been adopted. Summarizing, the main results of the present study are as follows: over a ten-year period, the performance of the wind turbine has declined of the order of 5%; the performance deterioration seems to be nonlinear as years pass by; after the gearbox replacement, a fraction of performance deterioration has been recovered, though not all because the rest of the turbine system has been operating for thirteen years from its original state. Finally, it should be noted that the estimate of performance decline is basically consistent with the few results available in the literature.

Estimation of the Performance Aging of the Vestas V52 Wind Turbine through Comparative Test Case Analysis

“…The aging estimate obtained in [24,25] was lower with respect to the results in [22], but is in general a non-negligible amount. On these grounds and given the ubiquitous deployment of the Vestas V52 wind turbine model, in [24,25], the importance of analyzing how general the obtained results were was noticed. This involves analyzing further test cases of the same wind turbine model, and the present work deals with this objective: four Vestas V52 wind turbines are studied, which are sited in southern Italy in a complex terrain.…”

“…The critical points of the approaches based on cumulative data can be overcome through an in-depth analysis of wind turbines' operation data and operation curves [24,25], which allows disentangling the aging effects from reliability degradation or ambient effects. In a nutshell, aging can be distinguished with respect to reliability by considering the behavior of operation curves when the wind turbines are running.…”

“…Aging can be distinguished with respect to ambient effects by analyzing operation curves such as the generator speed-power, rotor speed-power, and blade pitch-power curves [25]. The drawback of this approach is that it is costly from the point of view of data analysis: for example, the studies in [24][25][26], which constitute the premise of this work, dealt with a unique wind turbine.…”

“…In particular, the results in [24,25] constitute the motivation of the present work: in those studies, a Vestas V52 wind turbine was studied, which is sited at the Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland. The wind turbine has been operating since 2005, and operation data from 2008 to 2019 were analyzed.…”

Modeling of Ultra-Short Term Offshore Wind Power Prediction Based on Condition-Assessment of Wind Turbines

“…The declined health conditions of wind turbines will significantly reduce their capability of wind power generations [25]. R. Byrne et al and D. Astolfi et al assessed the wind turbine performance decline with age by analyzed the appropriate operation curves of wind turbine, the result shows that the efficiency reduced about 5% to 6.5% in the 10-year period decline [26,27]. In health condition assessment of wind turbines, several jobs have been done for evaluating the condition variations of the WTs.…”