An opportunistic maintenance strategy for wind turbines

Abstract

Maintenance strategies aim at reduction of the operation and maintenance cost of wind turbines. An opportunistic maintenance strategy offers cost advantages over the traditional preventive replacement maintenance strategy by considering cost dependency among maintenance activities. A new opportunistic maintenance strategy of wind turbines is proposed here. First, the proposed strategy includes two sets of reliability thresholds to handle subassemblies those are in operational and failed wind turbines. Using the reliability thresholds, ten maintenance modes and their service conditions are presented. Second, the Weibull distribution with an age reduction factor is introduced to describe reliability variation of subassemblies under imperfect maintenance. Third, the maintenance cost in each maintenance mode is expressed by a reliability variation‐based function that is dependent on the stage of maintenance activities. Fourth, due to the randomness of failures, the expected total maintenance cost is determined with Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed approach has been validated with the data provided by a wind farm located in Northern China.

Clustering Analysis of Wind Turbine Alarm Sequences Based on Domain Knowledge-Fused Word2vec

“…Given the advancement of the wind power industry and the extended lifespan of turbines, the operation and maintenance of wind turbines have received significant attention. According to statistics, operational and maintenance costs are projected at 10-15% for onshore wind farm projects, while offshore wind farms might incur higher costs, ranging from 14% to 30% of total project expenses [2]. Hence, investigating condition monitoring and fault diagnosis technologies becomes essential for advancing preventive maintenance strategies and subsequently lowering operational and maintenance costs.…”